


Ceremonial Heart

by TheBibleSalesman



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Brainwashing, F/M, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2018-08-31 01:25:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 26
Words: 271,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8557849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBibleSalesman/pseuds/TheBibleSalesman
Summary: A meditation on Genji Shimada's journey from murder victim to harmonious badass.





	1. PROLOGUE - Blue Dragon

**Author's Note:**

> Regarding the canon status of this story - I began writing it in November 2016 based on Genji/Hanzo/Zenyatta's hero profiles and the Dragons short, so it varies from canon established since then in terms of event timing and inclusion. Genji is in Blackwatch in this story, but his "Blackwatch Genji" condition does not make an appearance. If you would like to contact me on tumblr, I made a blog for posting resources used in the creation of this fic: [@thebiblesalesman](https://thebiblesalesman.tumblr.com/)
> 
> * * *
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_RYUU GA WAGA TEKI WO KURAU_

A pathetic enemy cleansed from the world, finding honor only in death.

He was eaten by what his father called the South Wind. Disembodied hands unfurled at the broken parapet, releasing him to the atmosphere. He fell in a torrent of his own parts. Red fiber fanned gossamer between his shoulder and the careless splay of his right arm, but the rest of his body was pruned from his heart. His head knocked forward, spurred by the zephyrs of the open sky. He saw the sword: a braided blue handle rising pillar-like out of his solar plexus, a red lotus christening the collar flush against his abdomen. He had been born to sheathe this weapon.

 

Brother would not deny him the ceremony of his death by filtering life direct from his heart. Principles mattered, the minutes between the killing blow in the family shrine-- sword bisected his armor as easily as the calligraphy paper a swipe before, certainty departing in a diagonal jet --and erasure of the body, essential. Roses smearing on walls as he staggered outside, the chase and catch around the dragon bell, the way his breath sounded when it was filling up with fluid: all vital sweeteners to Brother’s victory feast. Blue teeth evaporated from their punched slots in his cheekbone, razor-scaled coils unwound from the pulp of his belly. The dragon was sated. The tip of the sword sticking from Genji’s back broke when he landed.

 

Mother’s tea garden, he recognized it by the conservative breeds of bent green trees he cracked through to reach it. Impact jarred a red mist from his torso, the slick collective flowering out as his halo on the stones. The garden was made of posed rocks, and real flowers were sparse. Broken ribs stabbed from pink skin, like spines rising off a dragon’s back. Genji dropped his head to the side as vomit thrust out of him, a strain of bloody fire puddling across the ground from his mouth. Supposedly his mother took tea here. He never verified with his own eyes. She died when he was young.

 

Father had died too, just days ago. His tears thickened and ran him blind. He saw blurry pustules where the lanterns should hang, angle highlight sketches of benches and bleached trunks, and a coterie of black figures rising out of hiding from the azaleas past the tranquil sand swirls. Shadows lunged eager and amorphous through the garden to him. He looked away and down his own side, but everything past the solar plexus was flushed, stringy, indeterminate clot.

 

A leathery talon chucked under his oozing cheek, turning his face up, sending blood back down his throat. Hanzo’s blue sword shook inside him as the phantom clutched the handle. Genji thrashed his head, blood and salt dripping from his tongue, reflexively screaming his brother’s name but not in anger.

 

“Stop! You are going to kill him.” English. Thunderous. A huddle of dark shoulders detached from the periphery of the stars to conference around him. From English: _a murder of crows._ As his pride boiled to the notion of carrion feeders, his lips struggled together and apart in the symmetry that would make words if he had any breath behind them. _I belong to Brother, not you._

 

“A bit foregone, ain’t it?” Drawling, gloomy, hungry for Genji to get his death over with. Trespasses left his cheek and sword, but replaced with new and smaller incarnations, neoprene instead of leather. All over his body, drafting by touch what he could not see directly. He started to vomit again, choke, well up with tears like a child. And like a parent, the drawler tugged on his hair, stinging him away from the precipice. “This is the younger one.”

 

Genji had refreshed the color yesterday. Yesterday! He planned to honor Father by being the son he knew, not necessarily the one he wanted. The dams between his eyelids broke and water and blood foam cleared into the wounds on his cheeks. The crows picking him over had electric blue stars for eyes. The nearest ones molded over one another to slurp a singular plastic tongue down his throat, into his lungs. As they bent close he noticed the ghostly visors over their faces. He remained too alive to be comfortable. They chatted amongst themselves, English voices raucous and taunting.

 

“Let’s pull out while the old man is distracted.”

 

“Why he’s barely drinking legal. And this one…”

 

“It’s an expression you fucking hayseed.”

 

“Enough.” Thunder again. Maybe the dragon, clearing scavengers away from his meal. “We’re leaving.”

 

“With this?”

 

“Wasn’t he a target too?”

 

A crow pricked its glass beak into him, low, maybe a thigh. Genji’s drained senses only now responded to the hundred punctures the birds had already made, hacking ineffectively at his skin, picking wet threads of his clothing from his wounds. He panted hard enough to juggle the rib-ends roused through his chest, splitting himself open. Genji lost his eyes, they closed and betrayed him. Genji’s brain curdled.

 

He woke, the tension at either end of his body excruciating, his pallbearers pulling him apart; they lacked a stretcher. His body was unimpressed by crow poison and had woken him up to give death another try. Someone had stolen the sword from his chest. The kidnappers lumbered uphill toward the perimeter wall. Genji gazed into the starlit iris of the rocky garden left behind. It crawled with ants in expensive suits.

 

The blue sword lay in Mother’s sand in two pieces, and a triangular fragment had been nicked from one portion. Genji liked to think the missing remnant was still inside him. Hanzo could repair the break, join the halves of the trophy weapon together with fire. But he could never replace the lost metal. Got you, Brother. He never could resist a good Children's Day prank.

 

Blue broth wound through a vessel bunched under a crow’s wing, eventually toward Genji, glistering like a dragon. The child screamed, his own voice welling louder than blood in his ears. The formula came into him as even Hanzo had not managed, detaching soul from body, flushing his circulation and scribing his veins to him. A separate corvine jab brought the gel back, the killing calm, and his capacity to protest fogged over. The abductors never stopped gossiping around him, nonchalant as he died.

 

“Bagged most of it before security checked in.”

 

“What was that light before?”

 

“Maybe Snowflake can ask this mulched sonofabitch.”

 

“Hey now… She doesn’t like that name.”

 

Of course. They were crows. They were only interested in what lay after death.

 


	2. Iteration 25

 

Angela washed herself under an emergency chemical exposure shower. Ice-cold. She brought her own shampoo. After ringing off sink and mirror with a privacy curtain, she dried her hair with a forget-me-not hairdryer she had imported from her apartment. She scanned on her eyeshadow, watching herself in the mirror, smiling at the two dead shadows lurking in the horizon of her reflection. Her parents supported her for as long as they could.

 

She used a hand vacuum to clean the floor around the sink before she retracted the curtain. Tying her hair, she peeled a suit over her white scrubs. Not her sleek, breast-hugging Valkyrie agent of the battlefield, but wrinkly kin to hazard containment gear, with a glass face pane crowning its sagging blue cranium. She was the hazard. The only dainty part of the outfit was the gloves, which snapped around her fingertips with all the grandiosity of a sheet of paper. The material would still stop a syringe puncture, but she had full freedom of movement. And touch.

 

As she stood in a foot pool of disinfectant, hands against the wall of the decontamination port, more fluid spraying down her shoulders and instant-drying over her helmet’s face, she realized she had been living in the prep room for months. None of her subordinates or protégés minded. They were hatchling intellects ravenous for her advice on the infection crises that prompted the fallout suits in the first place. Even now, at the routine 4:30AM visit, they would be all smiles as her mummified feet touched the floor of the egg-shaped operation suite-- were any of them present.

 

Angela called on the lights-- “ _leicht_ ,” the atmospheric system booping confirmation --so she could confirm the abandonment. Only her and the patient, who was asleep, who had been asleep at least a week before Angela settled in with him properly. A week of tying off, filing down, inserting. Stabilization, fascination. Then maybe two days to catch up on sleep before the infections started. Because that was what tried hardest to kill him: not the conspicuous absence of most of his body matter, but the common cold, and other molehills conquered back in the earliest days of the century.

 

A trio of residents stumbled from the other decontamination port, all bowing heads and embarrassed laughter. She waved them to their monitoring stations and modeling boards, albeit with an uncharacteristic downward extremity to her lips. Maybe she couldn’t blame them: a stable patient was a boring patient. Even the enormous potential of technological achievement and metaphysical decoction did not satisfy a twelve-hour shift.

 

But Genji was too important. She approached the patient, the sleeping god of her existence. His life support blocks clustered neatly against the walls, interfacing with Genji through the honeycomb cord that dangled from the ceiling apex, suspending and feeding into him. A bed was too messy at this juncture, and too high a risk for contamination lay in the sheet folds. There was not much of Genji to lay out on such a device.

 

Tubes inserted past his lips and nostrils were covered in a transparent mouth cap, so she could detect when the skin dried out and apply petroleum jelly liberally. Red pectoral muscles clinging around the collar and shoulders of his new plasmetal ribcage appeared naked, but were coated in transparent shield compound and managed by nanomachine flexors that permitted the occasional dreaming twitch. Various unmatched tube ends and capped wires made a chandelier at the bottom of the torso, and along with the head that was the sum total of Genji Shimada.

 

His wounds had been superb little mysteries. She had photographs of the skin she’d removed on her personal hard drive. Not just penetrative but cauterizing, with traces of Lichtenberg figures. Accounts of the incident from her medics mentioned a blue light surging off the estate grounds, followed by the remains of Genji falling into the middle of the Blackwatch assault party. She could interpret the nebulous descriptor “blue light” as lightning, but alternatively, the Shimada family was by popular recall an inheritance of _dragons_.

 

Hanzo Shimada, the patient’s older brother, bore a dragon tattoo down his left arm, and reports-- though not photo evidence --suggested the dragon could spring to life. Mercy examined all the recovered limbs and pieces of limbs belonging to Genji. They bore no tattoos, and no scan typical or specialized registered any anomalous property that could be massaged into a canon of dragons. She had the appendages preserved for later study. Genji would make do with prosthetics.

 

“Good morning Genji,” Angela hummed. A ministration console popped up next to the hanging corpse as she drew close, and after entering her ID she asked the system to begin Iteration 25. Each iteration was an algorithm for chemical and nanomechanical adjustments to the patient’s conjoined central processing unit, a green snow globe of biomachine framework locked behind his skull. When Angela said _Genji_ , she meant that precious technical jewel.

 

The primary side effect of each iteration’s first dose was the lifting of the patient to REM sleep. That was what _good morning_ stood for. Genji’s eyes began tracing from side to side behind his closed eyelids, and the residents at the monitoring stations got a juicy clench in their shoulders as every screen lit up with new readings. The processor activity holo spread across the wall. It too was like a cobwebbed Lichtenberg figure, different colors delineating the nanite concentration and the depth of electrochemical charges. Angela rubbed the inert flank of Genji’s synthetic ribcage as she watched the morning news.

 

“What’s that?” The voice was tangibly heavy, a stone tied to her ponytail, dragging her head away from the patient. “Brain activity?” She had to focus up. Reyes was so tall. Tense too, wearing his black field kit. First stop checking the invalid, second going to war. Angela eyed the ordinance belt hanging off his hips.

 

“Of a sort. Did you allow decontamination?” He took off his beanie and showed her the top: dyed orange. Small victories. The disinfectant was meant to instant-dry transparently, but it was also not meant to interact with home knitting. “You should have donned the appropriate medical gear,” Angela offered in her best motherly distillation as he replaced his hat.

 

She lunged, bear-hugging the trunk of his arm, but it was too late. Through her inquiry she failed to notice he was taking off one of his combat gloves, and now he had Genji’s cheek cupped in his bare hand. “Please don’t,” she chirped, where physical protest failed completely.

 

“You certainly fixed his face up pretty.” He pushed in on Genji’s cheek with his hard thumb, dragging the lower eyelid down, nothing but the white of the eye exposed. Genji’s raw muscles twitched. He jerked his head away from the intrusion, and the Blackwatch commander released him with an inquiring curve of his lips.

 

“He is alive,” Angela warned him. “And it’s imitation.” Gabriel’s swarthy bearded face swung toward her. Hard light in the operation suite grayed his healthy skin, stenciled the ridges of brow and cheek. Another inhuman god in her theater.

 

“Imitation scarring?” He grinned, white teeth and amity even as his eyes gleamed. “That’s pretty sick.”

 

“For the purpose of enhancing the patient’s sense of reality and tangibility when he wakes.” Gabriel was beaming at her and she sensed imminent interrogation.

 

“It’s another of our secrets then. So when do we get from ‘technically alive’ to a soldier? Will he be able to kill Hanzo for us?”

 

“I can’t even begin to estimate that,” she insisted, eyes widening. “I am still calibrating the right dosage of antipsychotics his system will need to prevent secondary trauma and profound malbehavior on wake date. What you are seeing now under 25 is approaching normal function-- it was much worse.”

 

“Well while you’re at it, slip something in that will make him say yes to becoming my sword.” She consulted her datapad in lieu of response. “Don’t stress it.” Gabriel sighed, a throaty rattle that made Angela sniff the air for imprints of smoke. “I was treated the same. People like animals, but not wild animals. Besides, it looks like he’s already shaping up to be a good pet for you.” He rapped his knuckles on the spot Angela had been caressing before she noticed him. Genji’s heart ticked away under the frosted white plasmetal.

 

“Gabriel…” Like a lover’s faint non-protest, then she wrapped her hand into a fist, securing herself. “You should leave Hanzo to the police at this point.”

 

“You don’t get it.” How roomy a wingspan could one man’s shrug have? “Hanzo is back to the strength and security of his predecessor already. He owns the police. How about our own project?” He mapped Genji’s missing left arm with his hand, invoking the other brother’s tattoo.

 

“There is no evidence that the dragons are anything but superstition,” she groaned, and Gabriel laughed in sympathy. The mythos was their sloppy, embarrassing common interest. “I suspect it may be a technology, something worn.”

 

“In that case we’ll interrogate when he wakes up.”

 

“Please don’t hurt him. He’s not the head of the family, he probably doesn’t know anything--“ Angela clasped her hands together in front of her.

 

“Calm down.” Gabriel weighted her shoulder. “I’ll let you do it.”

 

“Really?” Her accent stuck out, not her Swiss origin but her youth. Her joined fist of prayer bobbed in front of her blue plastic wrap chest. “You won’t hurt him?”

 

“If the right injection gets us the information, who am I to argue for a fist?” Angela flung around his waist, needle arms against broad, solid back. He depressed the square cap of her hazard suit under his palm. “Besides,” his chest rumbled against her squished cheek. “I still want him to work for me.” Angela’s eyes popped open, and she felt the scrape of bulletproof mesh on her face as she lifted away.

 

“There are gangs in other parts of the world,” she preached.

 

“And we don’t get to ignore any one of them.” Defeat left her eyes fixed at nothing higher than his abdomen. She could make out the points of his elbows, his arms crossed over his chest. “We also don’t get to pretend the omniums--“ Gabriel caught himself talking about ghosts, and growled dry correction: “That any of our foes will ignore novel weapons lying at their feet just because they are broken. We must strike first. Get him up, sooner rather than later.”

 

“I won’t let you grind him up.”

 

“I thought I was being generous here.” Gabriel had an honest elevation to his eyebrows. “I know one of your flaws is being a goddamn bleeding heart in a war.”

 

“In a peacekeeping organization-- what do you mean _one_ of my flaws?”

 

Gabriel poked up one finger, wagging it as he turned his back.

 

“I’m not Morrison. I don’t believe in perfection. But I’ll accommodate all the sins I can.” The four other fingers rose and wiggled around like worms from the soil. She realized it was a wave goodbye.

 

The super soldier left her, combat boots a salvo across lustrous tiles, exit a thunderclap of the decon port door. Just as Angela noticed he had not used the foot pool to disinfect his steps, the ministration system bleeped a warning and flooded the operation suite with disinfectant. Not even Genji was safe, the orange torrent erasing all traces of human contact from his cheek.

 

Angela scooped excess fluid away from her patient’s eyes and breathing mask. The foul-looking chemical dried on her fingertips, turning clear.

 

* * *

 

“ _Snowflake._ ”

 

She posed doe-ish surprise, eyelash extender fueled. Genji narrowed his eyes, smiling keen as a cat. “Is that you?”

 

“Where did you hear that?” A beat in her voice described polite demand.

 

“I don’t know.” Angela licked the inside of her lower lip and dropped her exam lamp closer to Genji’s reassembled shoulder. Her pen tool passed three-dimensional macro photos of the join between his pectoral muscle and the fibers of the arm prosthesis, each cord evaluated to assure that aside from color, the meeting of flesh and machine was seamless. Genji had already cleared official examination; this was the artist checking if she liked the way the paint was smudged.

 

The arm was inert. Genji could not tease it off-camera if he wanted to. “Is it because you are perfect and unique?” he prodded. She looked up, not at Genji’s face but at the processor activity map blinking on the wall. Then she bent back over the composite shoulder, hesitating only to tug up the white sheet beginning to slither off Genji’s abdomen.

 

Genji had embraced the suggested unimportance of answering how his torso ended. Whenever she pulled over the cot, the end was stuffed with pillows to simulate legs beneath the sheets. During procedures he had to accept trailing off in white like a ghost or a bride.

 

She pulled the lamp back and arrowed an eye across the room at one of her stationed residents. A vice of blue metal dropped from the ceiling and nestled around the subject shoulder, humming, issuing traces of VOCs like fresh paint. Secondary clamp and pin indexed out from the hull of the main vice and lifted Genji’s arm perpendicular to his torso. The heart rate monitor beeped. Angela talked over it.

 

“It’s okay. This is the device that mediates the neural bonding process. All of us wrote the program for it together.” Genji’s gray eyes charted the mob of Overwatch doctors and residents packed at the front of the room, all of them in hazard suits.

 

“I know you would never hurt me,” he offered his vote. She tailored a soft, lyrical laugh for him. They were far enough away from the onlookers that their conversation remained private. Maybe not from the SEP medic near the back, but he did not know Japanese. Angela kept a recorder on her person for posterity, and to share with Genji’s prospective psychological counsel.

 

“You’re right,” Angela said, soothing Genji’s non-existent fear. “It’s not going to hurt at all. You may feel pressure on your shoulder, but it is not going to rise to painful levels. We can start over any time you feel uncomfortable, you just need to tell me. It should be like having your blood pressure taken. It won’t hurt but your mind may trick itself, because of the tightness.”

 

“Okay!” Genji laughed, though the noise ended on the breathless side. Angela activated the junction program. The delivery mechanism began to sing vibrato against Genji’s chimeric shoulder.

 

“Starting connection in three, two…”

 

She watched it later on the recording. The way Genji’s eyes traveled from glossy adoration to small, hard knots of fear, then pain. It was a beautifully realistic response.

 

He started screaming. Angela ignored the sound-- it was like any of the other distressed machines --but she saw the activity monitor flare red and blue-hot in ragged waves and explosions. His synthesizer rapidly articulated his cries into words:

 

“The dragon--dragon-- I am being ripped apart--“ She had staged her inquiry on _that_ particular bogy a couple nights before his official wake date, rolling him back to Iteration 7 to ensure compliance. The questioning still failed, Genji had been unable to maintain coherence. At that point some angel on Gabriel’s shoulder told him he could stand to wait for a field test, and Angela proceeded with Iteration 25, alongside some tweaks inspired by the questioning process.

 

But Genji’s exclamations reminded her of that night. She was disappointed he did not call her name for help.

 

It was not a pity cry at all, she decided in her review over a jumbo mug of coffee, but a narration. “ _The dragon consumes_ …” Genji’s honest ruminations, which were that no one was coming to help him. He proved a loud and dramatic thinker for as long as the agony kept him conscious. If nothing else, she now had a trauma test for the onboard ministration unit.

 

“Genji, Genji, Genji…” She swore his name as incantation later, just as his processor activity holo indicated he was going to wake up. She rocked the vestigial remains of his corpus against her hazard suit. His useless red arm hung dead, off the side of the cot, fingers splayed carelessly when they should have been clenched. She notched open the tranquilizer feed that crept beneath his bedsheets. When he started looking around with the clarity the drugs afforded, she offered the sitrep. “Something went wrong with the connection.”

 

Genji collected himself faster than anticipated: he noticed and studied the diagnostic scans of his shoulder layered along the east wall. One image depicted the branched nerve endings from the tip of his shoulder all the way up to central processing. She thumbed her datapad behind his back to deactivate the broadcast. His chest worked up and down with greater purpose beneath her.

 

“Dr. Ziegler,” he croaked, synthesizer interpreting a tight throat. “I think I am going to cry again.”

 

“I know.” She eased her arms around him, careful not to smile. She leaned in and his eyes responded up and down her face, watering as her forehead touched down against his. Angela dropped back and mussed his hair as he blinked out fat tears. “I sent out all the others once we revived you.” He trembled within the cell of her arms and the bedsheets, and his lips broke a frail smile, saltwater leaking into the upturned corners.

 

“Revived? Did I die again?” he teased, voice cracking.

 

“No.” She sighed sharply at her mistake. “My terminology was incorrect.” Genji would tie this back to snowflakes. A flaw was a facet. He brightened under her.

 

“I am proud to see the obscurity of my native tongue foils even the amazing Dr. Ziegler! Do you want to switch to English?”

 

“I meant to say you were unconscious. The program was not designed to render patients unconscious.” She blinked. “There are easier means for that.”

 

“Wow,” Genji hiccupped. Angela started picking tissues out of a box and wiping his face clean.

 

“Patients should not be unconscious and incapable of telling me how they feel,” she clarified, and Genji grinned wildly, a real knee-slapper induced somewhere in that statement. “There was no damage,” she added. “But I think further analysis will show it might be easier to replace everything in the upper body after all.”

 

“After all the time you spent culturing tissue,” Genji chuckled sympathetically. “I do not know why you wanted to keep it in the first place though. A weapon has no need for soft edges. I am happy to only be a sword.” She did not like his word use. Reyes had never relayed the agreement to Genji in those terms.

 

“I was trying to preserve--“ She stopped, cheeks flushing. Schoolgirl a few years late. Genji’s frayed eyebrows canted right up in surprise. “Your heart,” she finished flatly.

 

“A pretty fallible organ, isn’t it?” Any middle school health class will tell you the dangers of having a heart, Angela.

 

“Not yours.” Her voice broke weakly. At least a fourth of her was listening to a resident guess in her earpiece that the junction failure had been psychosomatic. “Your heart is very strong, Genji.” Praise for his responsible internal organ development made Genji blush right back at her, an ideal pattern of responsive pink fluid through the capillary carvings in his cheeks. “And it is whole. It wasn’t touched. I think I will try to preserve it anyway.”

 

“Getting my heart from my chest into a can seems like it could be a major operation,” Genji intoned with self-important gravity.

 

“No, it--“ Angela halted herself again.

 

“It’s not servicing much these days?” Genji finished for her. He tried to offer an easy out. “What about my brain?”

 

“Switching your nervous system to a synthetic nutrient pool and synthetic management was one of the first things we had to do to ensure your longevity.” Straight from her operations log. Genji’s heart rate monitor began beeping, which irritated her because she was only telling the truth. “That was long before you woke up. As your doctor, it is my responsibility to approximate your body and normal function as best I can.” She ignored the questing rings from the monitor, and placed her hand over his heart. “We can still create a more responsive skin layer, we can approximate--“

 

“I don’t need any of that to do what they want. Not to do the one thing I need to.”

 

“I think I will ask the counselor to visit you again,” she warned. Iteration 25 had assumed reasonably normal functions, but he could get feisty. And he cried a lot. Angela contemplated formulas for an Iteration 26, though she was unsure if he could be regressed to a null coma safely for the transition. He snapped her out of reverie with a fact check request.

 

“You said that when the arm is properly connected, it can sense pressure, injury. Even something as light as a hand grabbing onto it.”

 

“Yes…” she allowed. Genji shook his head gently.

 

“That is all I need.” His eyes had gone thin and his smile arched with feral noncompliance. “Are you detaining my recovery for your own reasons?”

 

“I did tell you paranoia was a potential side effect of the painkillers,” she countered, and Genji eased the air with a laugh.

 

“That is my doctor,” he cooed at her.

 

“Then, can you verbally approve the open document for the next procedure?” She held up her datapad, a hologram of the text springing out from the projector in the corner.

 

“Genji Shimada,” he said, and glanced at her.

 

“It’s July 9th.”

 

“July, nine, two-zero-six-zero.”

 

His eyes flicked away from even a suggestion of actually reading the document. He was looking over her shoulder at something, maybe the game console box rotting on a chair at the far side of the room. After a recent reread of his file, she bought it and suggested he could play it once they got both arms attached.

 

“Your roots are showing,” she said as she flicked a bead of saline from his left cheek with her fingertip. “Want me to dye your hair again?”

 

“Green and black huh?” Genji stuck out his tongue in mock disgust. “Please. Thank you, Angela. I am ready to go to sleep now.”

 

“Alright. I will wake you when we are prepared for the next procedure.” She thumbed her datapad and the contents of his internal ministration unit switched to the requested cocktail, pumping it through the snowglobe. He was a self-sustaining miracle, with remote command. She cupped Genji’s chin and moved her fingers up to his cheek, maintaining a connection. He moaned. He nudged his cheekbone against her palm, and shut his eyes.

 

“Angela,” his synthesizer called just as her shoulders started to ease down. “Will I ever become bald or gray?”

 

“No. But you will always have to dye it. I made sure of that.”

 

* * *

 

The unopened game console was transferred to a storage facility, where it rested in a bin till the logo on top of the box was fully obfuscated by dust.

 

Angela soothed Genji’s back with one hand and the cable driven into him with the other, tender and comprehensive with both machines. Her fingers traced the silver banding of the cable body to the handle and trigger lodged in one of Genji’s ports. Detaching the cable was like firing a gun, her pulse twitching at the snap of dislocating gears and the steamy air pressure equalization. She had two more to go. Each termination was followed with inspection of the plate between Genji’s shoulderblades, ensuring each protective scale slid back over the port access.

 

Most of Genji’s body was approximated by sculpted mechanical microfibers, but a stripe of gray plate housed maintenance access to his spine, and a similar sigil of armor planted the join of his collarbone. As her hands left the final divorced umbilical and port, he slid his feet together and shook off like a dog.

 

“Do you have discomfort?” she inquired, without specific expectation.

 

“Of course not.” He threw her a thumbs-up over his reddish shoulder. “But I have been due to stand on my own.” Angela knew. Two drone units were posted at the operation suite once Genji’s legs were connected, and they wrestled him back onto his bed more than once. Typical morning greetings: an exhausted “Yo!” and each of Genji’s arms trapped in a huge, crude iron counterpart.

 

“You have been behaving well lately,” she replied to the unspoken facts. “Shall we go outside?”

 

“Ye--“ His forward lunge ended reflexively as Angela’s hands encircled his stomach. He lifted his arm to get a good look at the doctor behind him.

 

“Perhaps clothes first?” She tipped her chin at the chair where the game console had reclined for so many months. Genji followed her lead and spotted the folded square of Overwatch gray and orange. He popped his hip out and braced his knuckles against the curve.

 

“Don’t you want everyone to admire your work?” Genji cocked his head back, presenting his over-the-shoulder eyes for the flock of whitecoats that always inspected his milestones. He tugged his body free of Angela, the stiffening of her arms nothing against his raw strength, and approached the chair. Angela tidied her posture, immediately accosted by curious medical staff. They smelled like fresh laundry and the taps of their fingers on tablets made a constant bug-like clicking behind their voices _._ Smiling, she answered the boldest questions. Others in the group simply observed Genji dressing from behind.

 

Ultimately the uniform design did not cover his shoulders, and stuck tight enough to his chest and back to inherit the slippery definition. The pants flared, bunched above the knee, and fastened there with a tug of cord just inside the hem. The black-gray “boots” extending slender and tapered below the cut-off were the cyborg’s naked legs. Genji turned around and flexed for the gathered doctors. He swiped a faceplate hanging on a peg above the chair and fit it over his scars and his eyes.

 

“That’s good Genji,” Angela encouraged as the green visor lit up. “It’s not too heavy?”

 

“Light as a feather,” he reported in English, eliciting a giddy coo from his audience. He drew two fingers under his chin and bowed his head to his doctor. The door in the south wall opened for the first time, doorframe filling with the blocky orange metal of the floating drones. “Lead the way, Angela.”

 

 _Outside_ was not the world.

 

They traveled a white corridor with no windows. Passed through airlock-style gates demanding keycards and retinal scans. With an entire squad of security drones bunched at the end of the hallway ahead, the exploration party was forced to turn right. Angela started leaning on the bar to open a wide traditional double door, but Genji reached past her and held it open. He let it drop shut in the faces of the medical observers after she and he passed through. The doctors creaked through the entrance on their own eventually, recalling their hands were not just for taking notes on their tablets.

 

Genji’s synthesizer hissed in his throat. Angela keyed open a portable display of his processor activity on her datapad, and invested in its colorful geometry while he prowled out onto a pumpkin orange running track. Crossing the white numbers marking each lane took him out of the shadows, his helmet frame glistening through sharp turns to every horizon.

 

Directly above at a distance of sixty-four meters was the stadium ceiling and a web of chrome catwalks. The walks and maintenance array tucked behind a hologram buffer of pale morning sky, an algorithm pumping random cloud arrangements along the stadium oval. Cumulonimbus piled monolithic in the west, puffs of virga cycling under its murky belly. The storm would never touch down; the world remained distant and beautiful in all her states.

 

Each cardinal direction meshed the overarching sky with its own hologram readout from some distant place and time. Night on Everest, breezy mornings tickling gulls over the Galapagos. Genji’s visor fixed on the clutter of an Indonesian rainforest for a long time: green fronds that fettered large striped tree trunks, colorful beetles with samurai helmets rolling balls of detritus through the brush, and infinity of small birds with long tails. Angela had taken Japan out of the potential rotations today.

 

The walls curved, bringing the holograms onto the floor to some extent, integrating the rows of practice weights and the stripe of the running track into natural themes. An Olympic swimming pool provided a controlled dip into the image of the Pacific Ocean. A low indentation at the north wall camouflaged as a cave aside from the overlay on the cave rim with an arrow and the text declaration _PRACTICE RANGE._ Bleachers lined the trackside to their left, mostly empty with a matte of swaying pines. Audio was a pipe feed of the Galapagos birds. The air hung at a breezy 23 degrees Celsius, and probably would have stunk of sweat if the arena’s usual inhabitants had not been cleared out several hours earlier.

 

Like a spaceship launch.

 

Angela went out to take Genji’s hand, started to exhale, and immediately noticed a scratch on the side of Genji’s thumb. The pale scuff glared out cleanly from the black surface. She lifted his hand and picked at the scratch, only to have it come off in her hand: a matted, broken partition of gray feather. When? How?

 

“Hey.” From the left, the bleachers. Genji tightened up like a cat. Angela was torn between looking at the speaker and thumbing down the new processor readouts on her pad.

 

“His sensory tech is oversaturated right now,” she excused absently. “It needs to be fed on experience like anything else.”

 

“Are you a fast learner, Genji?” the man on the bleachers asked. Gabriel Reyes slouched next to him, not speaking. Genji stared at the two of them, and the ensuing silence pocked by albatross honks pulled Angela from her analysis. Gabriel was sneering. Genji was peeking at her for teacher’s notes. The blond that made the inquiry had never come to call on the perpetually-in-recovery recruit before. Genji’s file did not speak to any worldly interests.

 

He did not know Strike Commander Morrison when he saw him.

 

“Answer him,” she cut sharply at the point.

 

“Yes, Dr. Ziegler,” Genji murred. Morrison leaned his elbows on his knees, his mouth a closed line, but a trace of spasm in the eye behind his blue visor piece. Gabriel regarded Genji with a narrow look, but also propped the back of his hand against his mouth in bastardization of a bronze sculpture. Such sculptures were not known to shake with laughter.

 

Genji rested his hands on the front of his legs and bowed a few degrees. “I noticed the lady pointing a rifle at me,” he answered as he popped back upright, green visor leveled straight at Morrison. “On the catwalk above the hologram.”

 

The cyborg peeked high over his shoulder, raising his finger and wagging it knowingly as he faced the Strike Commander once more. “She must have a radio feed from our location, because she just shifted her feet around.”

 

Morrison smiled. Reyes squinted off into the fake heaven, his jaw hanging in the effort of perception.

 

Genji rocked up on his toes at the (mostly) positive response. “And you are wearing cologne and he is not.” He pointed variously at Morrison, and Gabriel, who finally stopped flycatching.

 

Angela stared till she caught the Blackwatch man’s attention. Gabriel purposefully dropped his eyelids halfway, poked his shoulders up.

 

“How fast can he move? Strength?” Now Morrison was addressing her.

 

“Would you like to show them Genji?” He straightened when she said his name, dipped his helmet.

 

“Okay! How many times around?”

 

“One should be sufficient.” Angela cleared her throat and moved out of the way of the other doctors, toward the bleachers.

 

“Make it two so we know the first one isn’t a fluke,” Gabriel added just as she was sitting to the right of Morrison.

 

“Understood.” Genji chose lane nine, the far outer flank of the track closest to his audience. He flapped his arms at his sides, but assumed no special ready position. He leaned at the two men. “Umm.”

 

“What?” Gabriel demanded. Genji started tilting his head to Angela. The man in black took action: “GO!” he thundered at a volume that left Jack Morrison wiggling a fingertip in his own ear. Genji darted away with a high “ _yosh!_ ”

 

God, he was beautiful in motion. Angela’s fingers crushed into her datapad’s crack protector. Genji’s thighs and knees hiked high, his pointed feet dove to the orange track and lifted away so softly his footsteps resembled ritual blessings. Green and gold rippled across his processor image once the stimulation of Gabriel’s voice faded, neurons and nanites fashioning instinctive balance as he traveled tiger through the jungle. He was the nomad hunting in the depths of the desert, the white bird across the sea. As he closed on the finish line he was a neon glint across the twilight banks of Everest, bare gray arms swiping forward with the pump of each leg. Angela drew her knees together.

 

Did her residents and visitors see it too? The DaVinci figure resurrecting? She dared to look her servants over from her silver dais, lacking a readout of their brains to consult. Fingertips spun around tablets, scratching furiously as Genji met hurdles and crossed them with a jump, flip, and double-somersault. He bolted past her seat into his second lap, twisting to flash paired fingers in front of his chest to her.

 

“Yo!”

 

Jack Morrison tapped his visor piece’s command nodule to put a number to the cyborg’s velocity. His voice rolled out breathless and grumbling as the beach between waves.

 

“Think we need to go back about ten years.”

 

“I’d be down for that,” Gabriel agreed gravely from the other side, thumbing a device from his pocket. The Pacific Ocean at the far end of the arena flashed into a basketball game, live and screaming happy chaos, the announcer booming as he tried to keep up with the ongoing play. Genji’s processor activity squirreled in Angela’s hands. Full-fleshed Olympians loomed twenty meters high ahead of him. Team USA.

 

“You think he’d be allowed to compete?” Morrison wondered, blue eyes on the holo. Gabriel spun the remote in his palm, but instead of answering the Commander’s question, Angela saw him depress two fingers to his earpiece. The arena roared with the audience of another continent, she could not hear, but his full lips read easy:

 

_“Shoot him.”_

 

Her hair lifted from the back of her neck, her hands rose in a pacifist’s useless fists. Gabe leaned toward Jack. “For Team Japan. Same thing as Pang back when he was in the pros.”

 

“Shit,” Morrison growled. Sixty meters up, a falcon arrested her talon on the trigger guard as Genji flitted along the track below. Angela’s breath tasted like a burning poison, pupils withered to pencil-tip bores. Genji, look into the storm over your head. Genji, hear the click of her dive when she comes for you. Genji, for god’s sake _do not let him win._ Angela’s hands clasped to prayer, datapad squished between them.

 

Genji bounced sideways through the air and bullet glitter scored the track where he had been. Morrison rested his lips on top of interlaced fingers, eyes mostly back on the cyborg. Genji shouted at them, unheard past the beats of an Olympic basketball across the holo. He ran for the bleachers, establishing a jagged route across multiple track lanes.

 

Seconds passed in basketball cheers the falcon’s pupil fixed her quarry. Another bullet clicked off Genji’s hard ankle, and he sprang like a rabbit. Angela immediately sketched the mistake in setting a predictable arc and angle to his motion. The sniper shot him out of the air with a sideways snap to his armored medulla, knocking his jump into a faceplant across the track. Green _MUTE_ text flashed in under a three-point basket for Team USA.

 

Genji’s helmet swiveled up, the arena hush around him. Black fingers lifted from black streaks clawed in the polyurethane. He got to his feet and the keel of his visor rolled skyward and back down in a neckless drunken swirl. He did not miss a step as he walked back to the bleachers. The invited doctors erupted into oily murmurs of desire and congratulations. Angela’s fingers unzipped from their begging cross.

 

“Did I do something wrong?” Genji inquired in a low throb of his synthesizer.

 

“No,” Gabriel answered.

 

“She is using the catwalk to change positions. Is she going to shoot me again?”

 

“If you don’t stop her, I guess so. I didn’t rescind the order.” Gabriel smiled.

 

“Show us what you can do,” Morrison added, friendlier, for all it mattered.

 

“Jack--“

 

“It’s okay Angela,” Genji said as he turned around. Everyone told her it was fine, residents chuckling on her right, Morrison’s hand over her shoulder. Genji sprinted off the track, braiding through the weights, submerging into and swimming the length of the pool on a single breath, wet feet ticking onto an empty basketball court. Olympian figures reflected pale and godlike on the floor beneath him.

 

Genji hopped, sailing to the top of the home team backboard. Angela’s mouth dried.

 

Reyes yelled when the cyborg leaped twelve meters straight up in a tide of green light, latching to the side of the court’s levitating score cube. A few green dots blinked drowsily up the face of the cube as Genji scaled it.

 

Genji buckled like a roach on the top, out of sight. His legs fired, a gunshot through Angela’s brain as he reappeared, and he flew through another stratum of arena atmosphere. His hand ripped into the sky, tangling with a camouflaged walk access dangling from a projected nimbus. He scampered into the sky holo, the faintly perceptible city of catwalks above it shaking as he landed.

 

Not ten seconds later a synthesized yelp marked the end of tigers, nomads, and beautiful make-believe boys. Ana Amari rode a mobile platform down from her nest, silver-streaked hair flowing behind her, Genji collapsed at her feet. She landed her unconventional Valkyrie spacecraft in front of the bleachers and took Genji’s body by the back of his uniform.

 

“Hey boys.” She saluted, and both Jack and Gabriel were instantly keen and eager. “I bagged lu--“ Ana struggled to haul Genji’s dead weight all the way off the platform. She finally spread him out on the track with a yank of her thin but accurate arm. “Lunch!” she laughed.

 

Genji stirred as Angela flew down to him. He tried to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, but struck his helmet with a _clack_.

 

“Hey Briar Rose,” Reyes chided Genji, all three soldiers grinning at each other like people twenty years younger. Genji decided to drop his head back prone on the track. Angela’s hands fluttered over his helmet for a few seconds before she deduced this was not a medical issue.

 

“It’s alright,” Morrison chuckled. “No one’s gonna take Amari with his bare hands.”

 

“I don’t know about that,” Ana hummed. “Fareeha came from somewhere.” Mock scandal turned the men’s faces red. Ana squatted opposite Angela and touched the back of Genji’s helmet. “I am glad to see you well.” The cyborg’s face rose, level with Ana’s bent knees, green shining along the tight inseam of her pants. “It doesn’t look like I dented you.” Genji’s visor adjusted up, flashing at Ana’s face. “You got very close. Closer than anyone here has.” She passed him a wink.

 

“Thank you. Your sidearm…” Ana unhitched it from her belt and he reached to her offering hand immediately. The gun was unloaded. Angela’s back went icy. Ana smiled at her over the fallen cyborg, but would not acquiesce to posture.

 

“Yes, non-lethal,” she continued for Genji’s sake. “So it’s good for lost boys. Just a little pinch of naptime.” Genji turned the gun around, rising onto his knees. Ana touched his shoulder, and he handed the weapon back.

 

“I am used to that,” Genji wheezed. Ana proffered her empty hand, which he took far more gingerly than the gun. She helped him to his feet.

 

“Everything seems to be in order here,” Morrison announced. Reyes framed his eyesockets between thumb and forefinger at the tone. “Keep at it, Genji.”

 

“Yes…sir…” Genji still did not know Morrison’s name or position. The Commander dismissed himself, a datapad gleaming emergencies in his hand.

 

“Do you have any pain?” Angela asked. Ana was right: there wasn’t even a blemish on the back of Genji’s cream helmet. But overstimulation was its own kind of agony.

 

“No, thank you Dr. Ziegler,” Genji said softly, squeezing his arm around her shoulders.

 

“Angela is a miracle worker. She will take good care of you,” Ana said. “If you continue to feel well, I swim here in the early mornings when I am not on-mission. You are welcome to join me.”

 

“Swim?”

 

“Yes, it’s very relaxing.”

 

“Alright,” Gabriel thudded back into the conversation once the door shut on the departing Jack Morrison. “Tomorrow I’ll be the one to kick your ass Genji, then I’ll take you downstairs and we can figure a weapon that suits you.”

 

“A sword.”

 

“Did this exercise not teach you the importance of _range_?” Gabriel scoffed.

 

“I will kill Hanzo with a sword.”

 

Ana, in Arabic: _“I am sorry for your loss.”_ She turned to Gabriel, addressed him in English. “His agility is much higher than a typical swordfighter’s. The mission type seems reasonable.”

 

“You don’t know the full details of the mission.”

 

“Take care of him, won’t you? I would like to meet the man that defeats a gun with a sword. He would certainly keep us on our toes.” They continued to debate before their slighter, quieter spectators. Doctors remained on hover behind Genji, waiting for exercises to resume. Gabriel’s arms started to slip out of the defensive cross over his chest.

Angela twitched in her white heels when Genji sighed beside her. His fingers dabbled along her upper arm in adamantine curlycues. He did not seem to know when it was hard enough to start bruising beneath her sleeve, and her shoulders hiked up as she rolled her toes in the tips of her shoes.

 

“Genji,” she murmured. “I know it does not hurt, but could I examine you?”

 

“Of course, Angela.” He let her go.

 

He took a knee in front of her, reaching for his helmet. “I can do it,” she assured him, and unscrewed the tiny trick latches to the faceplate with her slender white fingers. She palmed his face and slid her hand away with the plate in it, setting it aside. Removing the helmet frame that hid the back of his head and hugged his jawline was trickier, more nodes to twist and latches to depress. Genji was a very handsome pocketwatch, and her first act after freeing him was to stroke the line of his chin and the back of his hair. “Bend your head forward please.” He exposed the back of his neck to her, a stripe of ebony plate that draped to the front like a bird’s collar of pigment.

 

She could see his shoulders and thighs tightening as the other doctors crammed in behind her. Amari and Reyes were still at it a few steps away, _you know shotguns don’t solve every problem either._ Genji lifted the armor scales from his neck access before she asked, but Angela leaned down and whispered “I’m sorry.” Outside observers had been in the contract he signed for resurrection. She took tweezers from her on-belt kit, the curved tips sliding from a sterilized blue pocket.

 

Angela propped her elbows on his back, inserting her tool through the top slot, closest to what would have been the brainstem in any other man. Genji allowed her to push him down, his arm bent to his one raised knee, a kneeling knight slowly crushed by unseen gravity. She teased aside a bundle of wiring. Omnics typically had sensors embedded in the fabric of each wire to help them determine if contact there was helpful or hurtful. Genji had no sensitivity human or omnic, nothing strong enough to debilitate or distract. He operated on trust. No one was allowed to touch him inside but her.

 

Angela bent forward from her hips for a better look at the parts under the wires.

 

Reyes finally looked over.

 

“Is he hurt?” Ana asked a few seconds later.

 

“I am happy to report no internal abrasion exists.” She would run more invasive diagnostics later, but it was the moment that mattered. Every second before the old soldiers kidnapped Genji into their causes mattered. “I would still ask that you please avoid shooting my patients in the future.” Angela tapped Genji’s chest. “You can stand.” He locked the plates over his neck quickly, but lagged on getting up. Angela braced the sides of his tightly clothed abdomen and pulled. The cyborg rose to his feet.

 

“Did you use some kind of special bullet, that it could not get through my armor?” he asked Ana.

 

“The kind for unexceptional people,” the sniper chuckled. “A bullet that cannot harm a hero.”

 

* * *

 

Angela woke with her steady surgeon’s hand down the front of her underwear, and glimpses of full IV lines and Iteration 7 writhing beneath her fading fast from mind. She sat up, slack jawed, platinum hair a knotty wreath around her face. She pulled her hand out, spreading her fingers apart in front of her face. Then she went for the chemical exposure shower, gasping as she yanked the cord.

 

Genji lay in a twist of his bedsheets on the floor beside his cot, a single support cord locked to the central access on his back, and a three-meter orange drone restraining his hand near the release trigger. Angela entered the operation suite, walked past the tableau with a sigh, and made herself some coffee in the next room over. She came back and the drone released its dull chrome clamp, floating off through the south door to resume its station outside.

 

“I wanted to go swimming…?” Genji stammered as she knelt beside him and set her coffee cup on the floor. His visor was barely alight. She estimated the sedative instruction to his nanomachines through the support cord remained active. Genji always wanted to go swimming with Ana after he’d tried her once. The nanomachine collusion let Angela sleep without responding to drone alarms from the outer halls.

 

“That was hours ago. It’s 11,” she explained in monotone because she could not manage _calm_ , and propped a hand on his shoulder so she could decouple the instructor cable. She actually pulled the trigger before reacting to a wild heat in the red-gray shoulder surface. Steam blew over her face, the cable wilted and shrunk back into the ceiling like a corrugate elephant trunk. “Do you have discomfort?” She waved her fingers over the shoulder, then elsewhere, back and arm. The warmth was not dissimilar to the layer of air directly over her coffee.

 

“Uhnn…nuh…uh…?” Genji slurred. Angela dropped from knees to a cross-legged seat beside the patient, whipping out her datapad.

 

“ _Leicht!”_ she snapped at the room, the noise and sudden flush of stark white making Genji jump. Onboard ministration should have started an automatic broadcast if any anomalies were detected. A self-sustaining system had no waste. Heat was waste. Genji’s body automatically exposed vents if internal temperatures reached a predefined level, but-- she dragged the sheet off his legs to make sure –-not one of those vents had opened while his artificial muscle perceptibly sizzled.

 

On the previous day, they had let the drones on the practice range shoot at Genji. Problem was, a simple two-gun drone could not _hit_ Genji. No damage sustained to account for the present anomaly. The day before that he had his fifth spar with Gabriel Reyes, and that ended much like the first four. His helmet had to be completely replaced, though at least Gabriel shredded and dislocated all his knuckles in the effort. Angela had already run diagnostics on damage to Genji’s processor case. She ran them again. She ran every core scan. The walls lit up with churning holos: all normal.

 

Was the anomaly confined to the surface muscle layer? If she bisected the shoulder…

 

Her datapad crackled, a brown bearded face overlaying her scans. Two days ago Gabriel had been grinning in delight while blood seeped out of his cracked forehead. Genji had climbed the towering man and rammed his broken faceguard into Gabriel’s skull. Today the skin appeared fine outside of a gray trace scar poking from the bottom of the beanie.

 

“Angela,” he growled. “Bring him.” The image wraithed back into the colorful processor diagrams. Her bent knees worked up in the air. Genji watched her, tilting his head like a baby bird.

 

“No pain? No discomfort?” she muttered over and over to herself. Ensconced by the glow of her useless holometrics, Angela dropped her datapad into her lap and stretched her arms over her head. Genji used the opening to hug her, his legs still skirted up in bedsheets but his body heat all-encompassing.

 

“What is wrong?” he asked, the chin of his helmet perched on her shoulder. After another second the helmet lifted, pulling back to look her eye to eyeframe. “Your heart is going very fast.”

 

“I thought you might be in danger. Now I don’t know.”

 

“From what?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“Is it because I tried to escape?”

 

“I don’t know.” She turned her face away from his. He curled one of her bangs around his finger.

 

“I will try not to do it again. But you should come swim with me and Amari.” Genji pulled a little on the hair he had trapped. “I bet my doctor looks good in a swimsuit.”

 

“Genji please.” She grinned, brushing her cheek. Genji’s hand had been resting too close, there was heat in her skin. “I will let you go swimming if you can handle today.”

 

“What is today? The Strike Commander?”

 

“No!” Angela laughed. “He may be there, but no. Today is just…better than swimming.” His visor lit all the way up. “Later I will have to make you sleep for a while to check some things, but…later. Go put your clothes on, okay?”

 

“Where will you be?” he asked as she got up with him.

 

“Doing my hair.”

 

“Wow…” He hustled to grab his uniform from a closet of identical sets, same as a prison ward.

 

Angela faced her mirror and combed her hair and decided she could handle Iteration 25. Her mother’s ghost offered a thumbs-up behind her own reflection. Iteration 25 was sweet and compliant, and to sate the soldiers of Overwatch had measures to ensure his battle capacity. She hated to do that, but she also hated to save Genji’s life only to send him out in a wheelchair controlled by mouth. Fits of rebellion had to be natural for some people, surely for Genji. It was in his file.

 

She squeezed the corner of her eye till a tear came out. Maybe the heat in his body was love.

 

Angela took Genji by the hand and led him out of the operation suite. Just the two of them, no gawkers, a nonintrusive pea-sized camera drone filming their gilded progression out of the double lockdown hallways to another wing of the science complex. Genji tried sticking to a window view of the campus outside when they passed it, but she promised him it got better.

 

An automatic door whisked open ahead, another airlock, though the keypad on this one had been deactivated. Genji touched the nose of his helmet.

 

“You smell it?” she prompted, letting his hand go before the inner door slid out of their way.

 

“I have not smelled this in a very long--“ Genji ducked his head as sunlight poured over it. He pointed ahead. “Not a hologram?!” Angela shook her head, and the cyborg ran through the door.

 

The sun had just arrived at noon, so it formed the white jewel centerpiece of the plasmetal dome. Lattice supports fragmented the blue Swiss sky, framed distant interludes of mountain peaks. Most ground-level scenery was obscured by the dome’s own inhabitants: tropical trees and floral hedges, a miniature vineyard, double-rows of most of the common fruit trees proceeding right in front of the door. That was where the scents came from: apple, peach, orange, and to Genji the sweet roots of carrots and tubers in the soil underground. To the right was a circle of stone flooring with the Overwatch logo embedded, currently overlayed with a single long table and a few smaller ones. A banner reading _Congratulations!_ hung between two oaks at the far side.

 

Genji trampled all over the garden and picked oranges and unripe apples, leaving his gathered treasure in a pile at the edge of the stone disk before he scampered off into the forest. Angela and her drone both lost sight of him. She headed onto the stone halo and approached the men already gathered there. Gabriel, leaning back in a chair at one of the smaller tables, a chessboard glowing on the tabletop. Another man sat next to him, equally allergic to keeping the front two legs of his chair on the ground, but also seemingly asleep, his wide-brim hat drawn over his face.

 

“Oh, hello Dr. Ziegler!” Gabriel’s opponent on the other side of the table thumped in greeting. Gabriel looked over and up the stripe of Angela, then past her shoulder to study the looted Garden of Eden at her back. The cowboy remained asleep.

 

“Hello Winston!” Angela cheered back. “My, you are teaching me something new every day. I had no idea Gabriel liked to play chess.”

 

“He’s playing himself,” Gabriel snorted, and the man next to him bobbed straight awake for a few seconds. He pulled his hat off his head and looked around, spotted Angela, and stuck his hand up. If he had greeting words, they got swallowed up in a yawn. He turned on his side against the metal chair, sniffed, and the snores returned quickly. Gabriel gestured at a box sitting on his side of the table. “He made another A.I.”

 

“Knight to F3,” the box cheeped, and Gabriel moved the piece. Angela eyed the sleeper at the table, but Gabriel sat up to block her view.

 

“Jetlag, he’ll be fine.”

 

“Hey,” Winston interjected, nostrils working so hard he had to prop up his glasses. He pivoted around on his feet and knuckles. “Is someone else here with you?”

 

“Oh, yes.” Angela cleared her throat. “I think he wanted to look at your flowers.”

 

“Smells funny-- _really?_ A like mind? Does he need help identifying them?” And the gorilla loped off into the jungle. Angela would have taken his seat, but he had been hunkering on the ground. Reyes watched her drag a chair over, blinking slowly as the metal legs squealed across the stone.

 

“At least you’re here early,” he said as Angela leaned over the chessboard and adjusted one of the white pawns. “He can meet Jesse before it starts.” The A.I. box issued another command and Gabriel slid a black knight near Angela’s queen. “Winston could’ve used an electronic board for this,” he grumped.

 

“He likes ‘tactile opportunity’.” She used Winston’s own phrase for it. “How many other scientists do you know with a tire swing?” Gabriel pushed out his lower lip and stared into the greenhouse forest.

 

“I had one of those. When I was a kid,” he muttered. Angela shook her head, smiling as she drew her next move.

 

“I’ll push you,” McCree mumbled from under his hat.

 

Genji waited till every guest had arrived to cry out in terror from the jungle. He ran out to Angela as she gave serious consideration to a celery stick over the completed chess game. He jabbed his powerful mechanical arm back at the trees.

 

“There is a wild animal in your base! And it spoke!”

 

“Well I am a wild party animal.” Winston had no trouble catching up with Genji over the open ground. The gorilla grinned out his lower fangs. “But they wouldn’t let me pick out the favors this time.” He winked at the celery pinched between Angela’s fingers. She wondered how long it took him to teach himself such a gesture, or if it was only possible due to his genetic therapy.

 

“Of course not Winston!” Lena Oxton laughed from her seat at the long table, her unique East End English bouncing all around the air. “It’s your party!” Genji rubbed under one of the little wings attached to the side of his helmet.

 

“Winston is an Overwatch researcher after graduating from basic training today,” Angela doled to him. “Of course considering his accomplishments, it was only a formality.”

 

“I’ll say!” Lena added.

 

Genji pointed at Winston again.

 

“That is a monkey.”

 

“We’re all friends here!” an old giant roared from further down the table. Genji looked around.

 

“Who are these people?”

 

“Remember what I told you?” Angela asked, staring steadily at her patient till he noticed her blue eyes. Genji tensed, drooped, then slogged off to go cower politely beside Ana at the far end of the long table bench. His knees pressed together, weight rocked back and forth in the same cyclical tempo of zoo animals patrolling their cages the world over.

 

Winston lumbered over to the chess party, which had gained Jack Morrison as an observer with his hand on the back of Gabriel’s chair, and Torbjörn Lindholm with a chair nudged very close to Angela’s. Winston’s thick lips pursed quizzically as he noticed the endgame. “I’m sorry,” Angela said. “I won.”

 

“Huh,” Jack sniffed from behind Gabriel. Just Jack today, dressed down to a t-shirt and partial leg armor with only a perfunctory service weapon at hand. “She beat you.” Gabriel’s eyes popped wide and he thrust both arms at the A.I. unit.

 

“It’s not me! It’s this dead, inanimate thing telling me what to do!” he snarled. Jack shook with laughter.

 

“Maybe you shouldn’t take orders from a blockhead.”

 

Gabriel smiled at Jack. Jack stopped laughing.

 

“Oh, I guess I have to head back to the drawing board,” Winston rumbled. “Sorry Thoth.” He patted the box.

 

“Pawn to C5?” the box beeped sadly. “Please beware of Queen.”

 

“Maybe you should take it easy on…it.” Jack was no longer looking at Gabriel. Luckily, Winston’s face was a nice big target. “I’m sure it could beat anyone besides Snowfl-- Mercy.”

 

“Ahhhh!” Genji was back. He pointed at Angela, then another hand in case anyone missed the first. Angela grabbed both hands and pulled them down while everyone stared at the cyborg.

 

“Yes, Snowflake,” she gritted out to him in a pointed private volume. He bent down to get his face closer to hers. “It’s something from another time. They use Mercy now.”

 

“Mercy is nice too,” Genji whispered back. His hands were still warm.

 

“Wake up.” Gabriel flicked McCree’s hat. McCree caught the brim and sat up.

 

“Hell…” the cowboy muttered as he tenderly calibrated the hat’s angle over his head.  Genji peered at the new voice, and a hand escaped Angela’s to point again.

 

“American!”

 

“I’m American too, asshole,” Gabriel snapped. Jack did not voice his own status but frowned a little. Genji’s visor flickered. “This is Jesse. He’ll be working with you on the Shimadas.”

 

“Alright.” Genji’s hand lowered, his voice turned steady and calculated. Angela’s stomach clenched. “Hi Jesse.”

 

“Hey there.” McCree had lit a cigar during his introduction, and wagged the burning end at Genji.

 

“Please don’t smoke here,” Angela piped in. “You will aggravate Winston’s sinuses.”

 

Jesse McCree’s glinting eyes lifted off Genji and settled on her face. He took a long drag off the cigar, watching her while she steeled herself to avoid giving him anything. He extinguished the cigar end with his bare fingers and stuffed the offending object in a box.

 

“You’re right a-course, don’t want to ruin his day.”

 

“Oh!” Winston heard his name, or maybe he was just a serendipitous gorilla. “Mr. McCree, now that you’re awake could we…?” He pulled a camera drone from his stretchy uniform and activated it. The drone floated up above his shoulder and tilted its lens around the group.

 

“Ha! Sure.”

 

Jack took charge of lining them up at the edge of the branded Overwatch platform, except for Gabriel who walked back from a phone call at the last second and planted himself directly beside the Strike Commander. Only, before Winston’s drone could take the snap, he turned his back.

 

“You trying to look cool or something?” Jack sighed as they all clustered around the drone afterwards to examine a hologram of the photo.

 

“I do look cool,” Gabriel growled back. “Genji, since you’re the newest, you’re on clean-up duty.” He threw out his arm to the table full of dirty party plates and discombobulated platters. One exception to the mess was Genji’s own plate, which had been empty the whole time.

 

“Isn’t Winston technically the newest--“ Genji shrank under the collective eye of Overwatch’s agents. “ _Yes!_ ” he corrected and scurried over to the table. “Yes, yep…” he continued in Japanese as he dragged over the trash can and started stacking plates. He tried sinking under the table when Winston discovered the pilfered fruit and bellowed loud enough to echo off the dome top. Eventually-- Angela waved him on with both hands --he crept over and bowed to the scientist.

 

“I am sorry Mr. Monkey, it was me. I saw them and became very excited.” Winston snuffled at the small cyborg, teeth jutting from his lower jaw. Genji’s head flinched lower, but his hand reached out and delicately pushed Winston’s glasses back up the bridge of his nose. Winston’s lips puckered, then the gorilla boomed with laughter.

 

“Okay, maybe you can help me tidy up here and uh…” He swiped the pile of unripe food from the ground and stuffed it in his mouth. “No harm done!” he whuffed through apples and carrots. Genji nodded. “I’ll explain how to plant them, maybe you can grow your own for the next time you’re hungry. I’ve designed these oranges to get blue flowers on the branch when they’re ripe, see…” Winston ate as he instructed and Genji followed him around, filling in his earlier tracks with handfuls of soil.

 

Angela linked her fingers together in front of her stomach, watching ape and mechanical man canvass the garden. Comfortable shade spotted their travels, but where she stood was in the full white light of the afternoon. Orange sash swaying between her thighs, she moved under the banner where they had taken the photo. _Congratulations!_ Without anyone else at her side, the red lettering became ominous.

 

Her eyes traveled right, to the chess table. Gabriel Reyes had reclaimed his throne. The moment she looked his way, he held up one finger, swirled it around in the air, and dropped it at the seat she had used before.

 

“Another round? My word Reyes, don’t you know when you’ve been beat?” she smirked as she took the chair. Gabriel stared across the field of squares at her, arms crossed.

 

“I’m taking Genji. How’s that?”

 

“You can’t.” Before _why_ , or _what_ , the counter-demand lashed out of her pink lips cold and hard. Gabriel sat up only to hunch forward, elbows on the table.

 

“You’re looking a little thin. You can go back to your apartment starting tonight, get some proper rest and remember how to eat. Some of my men hacked the prep room door code and removed your personal items. They’ll be in the duffel at the suite.”

 

“Gabriel.” If ever she needed a cyborg ninja to come jumping out of nowhere it was this moment, but Genji and Winston had moved even further away, shadows under the jungle trees. “You are not qualified to suggest treatment.”

 

“I’m not treating him. I’m sending him out to do his job. It’s been three years.” Angela shook her head, eyes everywhere but Gabriel. Was he right? Did her logs for the Genji project have dates from that long ago? Cloud storage did not have pages, did not grow fat like a paper diary. Egg-shaped, windowless rooms with constant light did not track the days.

 

Oh God, it sounded like the truth. “Angela.” Her blue eyes moved up and down his face. She did not like meeting his gaze, it was black but it was clear too. Nothing escaped the void. “It’s for you too.” She blushed, gnashed her teeth. “There are other patients. You’re barely older than this one, but everyone thinks he’s a kid and you’re a mature professional? That’s fucked up. So here’s what we’re going to do…” His black gloves fanned out to either side of the chess board. “I’m going to make Genji Shimada a productive member of society, something he has never been in his entire life. You are going to take the nanobiotics tech you developed on this project, pass it on to me and Jack--“

 

“Or I won’t. That technology is for healing. It’s not for soldiers to learn new ways to kill.” He was going to interrupt. Angela spoke louder. “You can hack a door code Gabriel, but you cannot touch my facility’s computers. You are not my boss…or my guardian. I decide what you get, and I can tell you it won’t be much.”

 

Gabriel did not speak. Angela fell back out of her element. Reyes, despite leading Overwatch’s covert ops, was not a quiet creature. He had fits of silence when he tried to get behind someone’s back without notice, but always came back like a cannon blast. Not when the enemy was right in front of him though. The vanguard was no time for reticence. Slowly she realized the fascination in him, that the creases around his eyebrows and lips were analytic instead of unappreciative.

 

“Maybe you did grow up a little,” he allowed. “Still got a heart that’s simultaneously mush and steel though, that’s no benefit to me. I’ll take my broken dragon at least.”

 

“You still shouldn’t.” She winced on her own behalf. She knew what a sweet plea sounded like at this stage. Gabriel set his jaw and his voice emerged far less sympathetic.

 

“You can’t be serious.”

 

“I found…I can’t explain it yet. His body is warm…”

 

“I’m sorry, did you just say he’s _warm_?”

 

“There has been an unexplained rise in his core temperature.” Dressing it up did not make Gabriel scowl any less. “Beyond that, I am not sure how he will perform outside of my presence.”

 

“You mean how he won’t scratch his ass without looking at you for permission first? I noticed. Morrison hasn’t, yet, but I have. You tweaked something too hard.” His eyes bored into hers with alternative insinuation-- _all sins --_ and she could not escape them now that she was fighting for Genji’s life. She realized they were not black eyes, just brown. Soft, even. It was the heavy brow, the omnic clawmarks, and the bruised wells of the eyesockets that made him _Reyes._ “Don’t worry about your boyfriend. I told McCree to take real good care of him.”

 

“Where is he?”

 

“Jesse? His plane leaves in a couple days, so I assume he’s getting down to whatever the fuck he wants till then. Formalities aside.” He flapped his hand at the banner. _Congratulations!_

 

“You’re not sending Genji with him.”

 

“Yeah, that wouldn’t be conspicuous,” Reyes grumbled. “No. Jesse is going to get back cozy on his own. Genji goes when conditioning is done. But he’s mine till then. You won’t be seeing him. I suppose if he doesn’t work out you can have him back, or what’s left of him.” He blew air out between his lips in a slow jet. Gabriel always had the airs of a smoker, but his lungs read crystal every annual. “I hope he works out. I need my other agent back too, he’s going to seed out there. Look…”

 

He dug around his pants pocket. “Look what he bought me.” Gabriel’s hand opened above the chess board. Resting in the palm was what looked like a turnip or onion, with a spiral of green octopoid roots wiggling out the bottom. “Look at this shit.” Angela’s lips went through a catalogue of expressions, none with permanence, and Gabriel nodded gravely.

 

“Genji told me he likes this character,” she offered.

 

Gabriel did not curse, he just sighed in a way that sounded like a curse.

 

“Give it to him.” He dumped the plush on the center of the chess board. It squeaked on impact. “Yeah, a farewell present from you. Do it.” Angela picked up the onion with two fingers around its tentacle.

 

“You should let me keep him for tonight. I can run some extra diagnostics to see if I can determine--“ Gabriel shook his head.

 

“He can play with the monkey till the sun goes down. Then he’s mine.” Angela turned to check the place of the sun, and Gabriel started hacking his way through a laugh. “Oh, you’re screwed up Doc.” Her face fell, lips tightening and eyes shutting till she had gotten up and turned her back to him. She ran for the forest, Pachimari balanced in front of her chest like a lotus.

 

As funny as he made it sound, Reyes dispensed his mirth when his audience left. Now all he had to do was watch and wait. Winston’s place only had one exit. Angela wasn’t that stupid anyway, a stuck pig heart for sure, but not stupid. He had let her persist for too long because even he bought into the angel, and now he would not even getting any tech out of it. Just a miracle.

 

“Hey, Jack…” he called into his tablet as he watched the doctor jump at Genji, constricting him in her arms, squeezing Pachimari in her needy fist till one of his cheap green legs popped off.

 

“This better be worth my time Reyes, I’m busy,” the Strike Commander answered without a hint of comradery. Gabriel’s mouth dragged itself wry, there were teeth involved, eyebrows digging hard.

 

“Nevermind,” he snapped back. Clicked the comm link off. “Asshole.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : _Howdy_ , Hanamura.  
> 
>   * A word on dates: in this chapter, Genji signs a procedure consent form in 2060. My framework for this starts on the old assumption/detail from Blizzard that the present Overwatch game takes place 60 years from the game’s date of release, so 2076. There are some contradictions to this, such as certain language versions of the “Recall” short claiming the Petras Act was signed in 2042. I’m trying not to sweat timing too much when the official material is so vague, but I will adjust the year if I really need to.  
> 
>   * _Lichtenberg figure_ : an imprint of the branching veins of an electrical discharge, frequently appearing on victims of lightning strikes  
> 
>   * _Briar Rose_ : Sleeping Beauty, of course Gabe knows this  
> 
>   * _Thoth_ : Egyptian god of wisdom  
> 
>   * re – Olympic basketball chat: There is a famous basketball player named Yao Ming who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in April 2016. Yao Ming is originally from China, but played for the NBA most of the time-- except at the Olympics, where he played for Team China instead of Team USA. This is a pretty common phenomenon in basketball, so Gabriel mentions a future Chinese player named Pang for whom this is also the case when Jack suggests illegally submitting a cyborg to play for Team USA. :P  
> 
>   * I’m just really tickled that the known covert ops agents are a cowboy and the shotgun king  
> 
>   * lol Mercy 
> 



	3. Blackout

 

Neon veins tore up the walls, throbbing to the tempo of house pop. If any sound made it over the music it was metal in nature: rattling of cans into vending machine bins, archaic dings of a cash register opening, clunks and hisses of restroom doors, the tick of an omnic’s toe against an empty beer bottle no one knew was there. Every face was a different color when people moved, staunched white and shroud-like when they stooped to the photoelectric kiosks littering the floor. The black rubber grip of the joystick sat strangely in his hand. Genji unwrapped his fingers, considering the mechanical pilus and the warty array of huge plastic buttons beside it. A command station for an idiot jet pilot.

 

An electronic cherry blossom lit in outline on the wall across from him, each petal filling with light pink dots, fixture flashing the characters _GOLDEN WEEK DOUBLE CREDS_ underneath. Its strobing magenta radiation just grazed the top spikes of Genji’s hair, drawing out his silhouette in dusty space. He touched the joystick again, thumb on top, fingers on the bumps between the ergonomic grooves. When he pushed the stick, he could feel it slot into one of its predefined directions, more than four cardinals but less than a single twist of a man’s hip. _Tock, tock._

 

The game in the arcade cabinet switched screens from preview to high scores, knight’s sigils written in three English letters each. _G J I_ had superseded _S H I_ just today. Firework pixels fractured the margins. Genji glanced at the names, but it was reflexive, a response to the change in light. He could barely keep his eyes on victory. He massaged his fingers down the skeleton of the console, withdrawing when he ran into the sticky trace of chewing gum. Trying the joystick a third time, his stomach still turned over, alien to the machine. He depressed the fat red trigger button on the top.

 

At first he thought the trigger had shut off his eyes, his ears, his whole body. The arcade walls went black, jangling of games and promotions choked out of the air. People around him mimed cockroaches in reverse, crawling toward the sunlight protruding through the building’s front doors.

 

Like the others trapped in the far back of the arcade, Genji pulled out his phone and unlocked it. Intimate peach illumination rose from the bare thighs and orange tie of his current phone background and stroked a gauzy spotlight across his face while he searched for the flashlight app.

 

He swiped left on the stack of untended text messages with his brother’s name on them.

 

“How typical,” Hanzo declared at his back. Genji twisted toward him, phone a guilty glow in his palm. Hanzo wore a navy pinstripe suit that faded into the blackout, but the light from Genji’s hand made an upside-down interpretation of his pronounced cheekbones and nose, and put an oily gloss to his long ebony hair.

 

“You look funny,” Genji greeted.

 

“This was a poor tactical choice for hiding yourself.”

 

“I did not want to go far.” Some of Hanzo’s sneer untangled itself. Genji leaned on his console to face the Shimada heir. He stuck his phone out, maintaining the light on both their faces. “I am surprised you came in here.”

 

“Standing outside and howling for you didn’t work.” Hanzo waited for Genji’s lips to pop in surprise before he smiled, triumphant. “So I came…” he looked around the powerless arcade.

 

“To this place where a man deafens himself to excruciating music and children’s games?” Genji guessed.

 

“I was not going to say anything.” Hanzo audibly prided himself on the restraint. “Is that what you think?”

 

The younger brother filtered his hand through his dyed hair.

 

“Maybe I have finally grown out of it,” he suggested, lighting the dim air with his grin. Hanzo withdrew from the attempted levity, jaw setting.

 

“We shall see.” Hanzo’s hand cocked near his hip, dark eyes active for there being so little to see. “For now we need to leave.”

 

“I am sure the power will be back soon so you can be entertained, Brother. You just need to be patient.”

 

“You are so unbearably preposterous.” Standard insult attempt. Genji yawned, starting to pull his phone up so he could browse the Net. Hanzo grabbed his wrist and forced it back out, squeezing the delicate bones together. Loose heat from a lower cabinet vent burned around Genji’s ankles. Hanzo’s tension was magnetic, the attracting and repulsing ends, shoving Genji against the defunct game while yanking his arm forward. Genji aimed his free palm heel for Hanzo’s forehead, but his brother’s hand jumped to catch the insult. “ _Stop,_ ” Hanzo demanded.

 

“I am not the one doing things!” Genji puffed back. Hanzo squeezed too hard. The phone dropped from Genji’s hand and clattered on the red linoleum. He swept his arms out wide as bird wings to clear Hanzo’s grip on him, and squatted to pick his tech up. “Damn!” He scrubbed a scuff on the upper left corner with his jacket sleeve. Above him, Hanzo turned his head, investigating the shadows.

 

“Come quietly,” he instructed.

 

“Fuck you!”

 

“You did not appear heavily invested in your choice of entertainment,” Hanzo muttered, prompting a glare up from the damaged phone.

 

“You know I hate being watched.”

 

“And yet I remain your brother,” Hanzo sighed. “The one who must watch when no one else cares to. We have been summoned.” Pale surprise blanked Genji’s face, but the sentiment corroded too easy.

 

“So what.”

 

“By our Father, Genji.” This time Hanzo’s noble countenance broke into parted lips and crumpled eyebrows, and Genji pressed the blade in.

 

“So. What.”

 

At the back row of machines, an omnic in front of _Tokyotropolis Laserdrift_ activated an internal light source. Its unassuming square head turned translucent, broadcasting omnidirectional violet light through the arcade’s deepest rows. Even the omnic’s wires glowed, worming white and bright purple inside the head casing. The robot was wearing a t-shirt with reflective characters spelling _black swan,_ and its fleshier accomplices immediately began vacillating on whether its cranial display was beautiful or gross.

 

“Now you can see,” it said with a synthesized sniff of practicality, unimpressed with the various human opinions. “Check this out.” Segmented fingers crawled to the left side of the _Tokyotropolis_ cabinet. The lone game bubbled to life. Genji turned around and investigated the left corner of his cabinet, discovering an empty port. The outlet was hosted in a black plate with three English letters AYP on top, like a high score. Sticking his finger in logically would not do anything, but he was tempted to try anyway…

 

Hanzo grabbed the styled tips of his hair and dragged him back from the machine.

 

“Shit-- don’t!” Genji squawked as his brother slapped an arm behind his shoulders and shoved him down the stairs toward the arcade exit. While the omnic’s friends toyed with the reactivated game, its glowing head twisted after the two brothers, and tocked to one side in shiny confusion.

 

Hanzo was a storm at Genji’s back, clearing him out into the street and slamming him against the door of a waiting black town car.

 

A wrinkly, bald man with a puckered spine emerged from the driver’s door and opened the back for them. Hanzo released Genji, who crawled into the miniature room of dark blue cushions and immediately noticed the lack of their usual security guards sharing the space. He tried to back out, but Hanzo stepped into the car behind him and shut the door.

 

Genji made a tactical leap for the wide rearmost seat, and Hanzo shoved him back off it. The older Shimada remained silent as the car began moving. “We could walk to the Castle from here, lazy!” Genji grumbled, only to peer out the tinted window and realize the car was gliding away from the shadow of Hanamura. “Why did the power go out?” he wondered, to which Hanzo continued his oath of silence. Genji dropped onto a cushion eventually, sagging his legs across the floor. He propped his arm over the back of the seats and glowered at Hanzo.

 

Eventually Hanzo began adjusting his tie, ticking a mirror panel from the ceiling to make exacting corrections to the sit of his clothing and hair. He opened the door-mounted cooler and cracked a fresh bottle of shochu, filling a quarter of a marbled stone cup. He passed this cup to Genji, before pouring a second for himself. Hanzo leaned back in his seat and sipped. Genji, whose demands had never before been met with anything but _you are a child,_ and who had spent a handsome chunk of time seeking alcohol from other sources, had no idea what to do with the expensive drink and simply clutched the cup near his chest.

 

Night dawned, but in the muddy remnants of sunset Genji recognized the rolls of farmland their car passed. He jerked his thumb at the black partition separating them from their peach turtle of a driver. “Father told Tadao?” Hanzo poured himself another cup of shochu. Genji arrested his own in a cupholder and climbed to the front, opening the window trap. “Congratulations Gramps!” he cheered.

 

“Your father honors me,” the old man replied. “As do you both, for riding in my car in these troubled times. I will do my best.”

 

“Thank you,” Hanzo spoke up from the back. After Genji closed the trap, he added, “Father could not very well drive us himself.” He opened the floor storage with the toe of his shoe, bending with his cup balanced in his left hand to pull out a metal breastplate. “Under your jacket,” he ordered. Genji shrugged off his brown bomber nylon, locking the familiar armor over his t-shirt. He smiled prettily at Hanzo, who groaned and dragged a folded orange scarf out of storage, lobbing it at him. Genji arranged the scarf around his collar, and pulled the jacket back over his shoulders. He stretched out his legs in black jeans, tagged his sneaker heels against the floor a few times, and decided:

 

“I don’t understand what this is for. We can’t be going to train.” He pushed his fingers across the left of the breastplate, taking a few deep breaths just to feel the press of his chest against the case of hard armor. “What about you?” He lifted his chin at Hanzo.

 

“There is bulletproof material underneath.” Hanzo made a similar draw of fingers across his collarbone.

 

“Modern ninja,” Genji teased. “Thought you were going to shoot that robot too.”

 

“Only if it moved toward you.” Hanzo capped the shochu bottle and slipped it in the cooler, picking up his cup and continuing to hold it even when Genji was sure it was empty.

 

“Are you okay?”

 

“I am fine.” Hanzo shut his eyes, the unelaborate cupid curve of his mouth struggling for complicity with his words. “Father thinks there will be an attempt.” Genji frowned, but sought over Hanzo’s face for clues.

 

“Which one?”

 

“Either, both.”

 

“I find that hard to believe. It would have been easier when we were children.”

 

“It may have taken them this long to figure out how to work together.” Hanzo opened his eyes and stared back at Genji. “And you are still a--” Genji held out the extra shochu cup to his brother. Hanzo took the gift, pouring the liquid from Genji’s cup to his own before he started sipping. Genji held onto the brief pleasure of the moment, even if the conversation did not allow smiles.

 

“Then he thinks it will be soon.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I am sorry, Brother. It is far too early. Did you want to go to him anyway?”

 

“Always with your words,” Hanzo snarled. Genji started to assemble his surprise, but Hanzo was faster. “ _Don’t_. The only reason you would think that is possible, that defying Father’s wishes to serve your own needs is acceptable, is because he has coddled you so.”

 

“Then, when you say Father summoned us, did you mean yourself?” Genji bristled. Hanzo laughed dry and bitter as tea leaves left to rot. Then his lips settled for disdain, at least till Genji spoke again. “Maybe it is not our uncles Father needs to worry about then. One of his sons sees far into the future.”

 

Trees grew black and wiry outside the windows. Tadao ticked up the heat to their compartment, because their path had ascended to mountain shores and spring sunlight no longer held sway.

 

“It is my duty. But in truth you have always had talented eyes. You see things differently from others in our family,” he growled. “You were born to the same fate as me.”

 

“By three years, I think not!”

 

“I have often considered whether or not your choice to waste your gifts on pointless pursuits was simply a ruse, to let you swoop upon me at a moment of ill defense, and claim your birthright.”

 

“That’s right,” Genji laughed. “My entire life is a ruse. But you are pretty easy to trick, I’m not sure I would need all that.”

 

“Shut up.”

 

“I thought you wanted to hear about what I see with my talented eyes?”

 

Tadao let them out at a ditch on the roadside, creaking the limo around an awkward three-point turn on the empty route. Not a single headlight shined in either direction.

 

“Farewell for now, Masters,” he offered through his window. “Did you take some water from-- oh, Genji has them.” The younger brother hefted his case of water bottles, grinning.

 

Tadao gave the forest of fifteen-meter trees beyond the road a lengthy critique, flecks of white brow scrunching over his layered eyelids. “This is the right location?”

 

“Yes, thank you Gramps,” Genji answered. “We can find our way from here.”

 

“Then I will return when the time is right. Please give my respects to your ancestors.”

 

They waited for Tadao’s car to disappear in the night. Genji straightened his back, rising on his toes.

 

“I think the power is back on. See the shine from the other side of the mountain?”

 

“I see a bum standing on the side of the road with trash clutched in his hands as if it were gold.”

 

“You should have taken a blanket.” Genji showed off the red one draped over his shoulder. “How are you going to sit anywhere in that fashion?”

 

“Hmm.”

 

Genji took this to mean his talented eyes had spotted a flaw in Hanzo’s evening plans.

 

Hanzo did not ask for the blanket till they arrived at the bank of the great silver river. Genji folded it over double and laid it across the reedy sands with excessive flourish. Hanzo waited with his eyes semi-permanently rolled up at the moon, then sat down on the padding, Genji beside him. Hanzo crossed arms and legs even if it strained the knees of his suit trousers. Genji stuck his legs out straight and leaned back on his hands.

 

“Water?”

 

“No.” A few minutes later: “Yes.” Genji distributed bottles. Hanzo spit to one side with a hiss of discomfort. “This is cold.”

 

“I’m not sure what you expected, Brother.”

 

Genji woke up when his choice of pillow, Hanzo’s arm, started shivering beneath him. His eyes had to adjust to another layer of darkness: the moon had gone out, and they were a long way from the rising sun. Yet stars cluttered heaven, winking off the rolling flows of the river, and he found some sense to the shadows around him by their light. Maybe it had not been the brightest idea to seat themselves under the same tree they always did, but he had not thought about the extra shade in the night. “Dummy,” he whispered, standing up and folding his half of the blanket around Hanzo’s navy shoulder.

 

He set his bare jeans to the bank and it was colder, but leaning to his brother he could feel the heat in his arm. If he just tucked up like a kid, it would be okay.

 

“I have never seen a future where you were not allied with me,” Hanzo announced. Genji dug his face into the pinstriped sleeve.

 

“This is not the time.”

 

“Do you want me to wait till it is done and you have fled on the wind? Do you have any idea the kind of dishonor that will bring upon our family?”

 

“It’s not as though you would let me stay as I am.”

 

Hanzo made a low noise in his throat, another _hmm_ not fully realized. Genji refrained from telling him he sounded like an old man every time he did it.

 

“You could be trained.”

 

“I could be trained to be someone other than me?” Genji stuck out his tongue. “I will make a deal with you. If you take all the money and put it into legitimate businesses--“ He had all of Hanzo’s attention, hopes, and closely guarded dreams on him. “--I will take an etiquette class before I go. You can pay for it.” Hanzo withered through a sigh.

 

“You were complicit in our empire the moment you were born. Every time you buy your frivolities, you are spending money the clan made in all the avenues we know.”

 

“Why do you think I am leaving? Do not say ‘our’ empire Brother, it will always be yours. I hope you will guide it as Father wishes.”

 

“You know even less about him than you do about etiquette. He told us stories, that is all. And when you go to that world out there, how will you live? You are trained only to the family’s arts. I do not see it.”

 

“You did say I was the one with the talented eyes.”

 

“And so you should be at my side. If you have ever seen anything but foolishness in Father’s myths, you should be there to show me. I will allow you to be useful.”

 

“But Brother…” Hanzo’s hair masked the portrait of his face from Genji. “Assassins? That is more archaic than any tale Father has spun. I hope to live without any of our family’s trades. I do not want to kill anyone. It is the same hope I have for you.”

 

“Your useless dreams are far too late.” The black mane above him rippled in a defiant shake of Hanzo’s head. Genji sat up from his arm.

 

“What do you mean?” Hanzo’s face turned on him, glaring.

 

“The man sent to our room by the Aoyama was not killed by security.”

 

Hanzo appeared quite satisfied with Genji’s shock, a naked look rendered wan and vague in the starlight. His lips bent smugly as Genji rationalized:

 

“That was the only man though? Self-defense?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I remember, he was killed cleanly.” Genji laid the side of his hand diagonal across his throat.

 

“He was not worth my time.”

 

Genji grasped Hanzo’s shoulder, breathing out slowly. “Do you know what it felt like?” Hanzo speared through this release of tension. Gray eyes wavered toward brown ones, pupils small.

 

“Brother--“

 

“Nothing.” Genji blinked hard. Hanzo pressed on: “Killing is a rejection of everything your enemy has ever thought or been. Killing turns a man into an object. Most are trash to be buried. A few can be tools. That is all. Some people must be removed from your path, if you would carry on.”

 

“That is not really what you think,” Genji stammered.

 

“It is an inescapable truth that Father never told you. Why teach you the sword if you are not meant to clear a path?”

 

Both brothers were awake for the sunrise. But before the arrival of any heavenly source, a trace of gold reflected off the curving trail of the river before them. Hanzo’s eyes, hooded and drained, followed the departing shine to the horizon. Genji’s eyes, bright and keen, scrutinized the teary settling of his brother’s face.

 

The phone in Hanzo’s trouser pocket began ringing, default tone.

 

When they went to the Castle later, both their uncles bowed to Hanzo beside their father’s bed. Great-uncle showed himself too, standing off in the wings and smiling at Genji, who bowed to him. Lots of things besides humans smiled in the world. Crocodiles, and snakes.

 

Cousins and other people of ever greater relational distance all gathered around the heir, none with the slightest bone of challenge to their prostrations. Genji stood alone in his room, examining his hair in the mirror and identifying traces of black in the minty green coloring. Later that night, the yelling that was not fit for clan-wide display began in the large meeting room. Blurred voices echoed through Genji’s walls, a surprising amount of the tone sounded like Hanzo. Was it that difficult to marshal their uncles into line?

 

He would not have been denied entry to the meeting to save his brother, but it was the kind of room a man could never leave. Genji went to his father’s room instead, past the spring olive doorframe clouded with bodyguards, taking a seat beside the figure on the bed. His father’s shroud was white, with a golden dragon climbing right to left across the center. He pulled a stiff, pale hand from under the cloth, a hand yet to wither away to age, but nonetheless inanimate under his fingers. Nothing rose to meet the green light he stippled across the cold palm.

 

Genji did not cry for his father. He did not think tears were part of his nature, only cursing, or finding inappropriate humor. Like how funny it was Father had died on Showa Day, a holiday no one celebrated, but a date that ensured no auspicious funeral opportunities for another week.

 

"Trying to make me think about it, are you?"

 

That was how Genji said goodbye to the storyteller: smiling, appreciative of a good joke.

 

* * *

 

Agent McCree sat in a cherry red SUV on a foothill northwest of the greater Mt. Fuji area, watching for UFOs. Twenty-two years old, with sharp tawny eyes that caught the red in the sky like a fiery possession, and patient as a rattler, the only thing he really lacked for his chosen hobby was a bottle of whiskey to go with his cigar. The smoke haze off the cig's tip turned pink as he relaxed his hand out the driver’s side window. Marches of belly-gilded orange clouds traveled the mountain sky on sluggish winds. The trees around him had been reduced to grungy brown sticks by the season, and the only warmth came from the flame burning slowly through his tobacco.

 

He had a suspect area approximately three kilometers north of his position, further up the mountain but still within the treeline. The roof shingles of a small estate twinkled at him in the dying sun. Once spring hit the house would be completely obscured by foliage. Right now the trees had buds but were too scared of the long nights to release them.

 

The UFO arrived before the sun left. McCree spotted it for the first time when it poked a hole in the cloud line, but he only picked it out again as it came to a hover over the estate. Its presence darkened the rooftop, and the jagged, leafless canopy undulated behind it like a mirage from some faraway desert. McCree was cheating (at least half the key to any victory): he knew the UFO’s real face was vast, eagle-like, and black.

 

 A green switchblade flicked out from the UFO’s belly, not to abduct but to return. An emerald trail dropped from the roof shingles to earth and disappeared through the estate’s storm shutters. With phantasmic dial-up of an unseen engine, the UFO departed again, punching another hole in the distant cirrus.

 

McCree waited another hour till the sun was a rose memory in the west. He gunned his car, rolled up the window, and drove three kilometers over dirt roads, for all it mattered to the vehicle’s hover-jets. He traveled slow, headlights off, thankful for kept schedules.

 

His cautious SUV rolled onto a pad of amber cobblestone and parked next to the front gate. The barrier was decorative, painted gold with no lock. A garden of genetically modified vegetables sat left and right of the stepping stones to the estate’s main shutter, ignoring the winter and coloring his passing. He would pick himself a couple tomatoes on the way out. The estate had no doorbell, the frosted pink shutters parted automatically when he reached the end of the stepping stones. Watercolor sakuras glowed across the atrium as he stepped inside, fading in seconds, an electronic windchime sounding through the paper corridors.

 

He waited for Genji Shimada. The Genji on file was a smart-mouthed little dust devil, as inconsequential as he had been ferocious. The Genji made of machine parts McCree had nothing on, save a list of conditioning results, 1s and 0s, and a few seconds’ meeting in a place that stunk of animals, fruit, and sugar (and when Mercy had been nearby-- antiseptic). His first objective was to crack that armored husk. Couldn’t work anyone over without trust.

 

Actually both his Shimada assignments started out the same way, he thought. It was all about routines, and charm.

 

Routines: to start with, Genji had not turned on a single interior house light. The atrium was lit up like a cozy pearlescent peach for guests, but the outer hall to either side went black real quick. McCree edged out of the atrium into the foreboding corridor, making for the light sliders on the other side of the atrium wall. He accidentally ticked the outside lights and the estate became a ghost on the mountainside, peering across the frozen and shattered land. McCree slid the widget back down and tried another, and electric lamps kindled the ocean blue hallway.

 

Genji Shimada was standing next to him.

 

“Whoa! Jesus!” McCree took a big step back into the guest corral, holding his hands up. “Sorry for disturbing.” Not going to lose his mind over a phantom ninja, no sir, not Jesse goddamn McCree. Just because that white and gray helmet swooping in from the pitch black was a lot spookier than when Genji was fidgeting in the greenhouse sun did not mean the Shimada had won anything. McCree put a frame on it: he had more than a head of height on Genji, therefore, nothing to be scared of. Genji was dressed the same as back then, Overwatch orange, only now there was a short blade balanced over the rear of his hips.

 

McCree on the other hand was shiny and new: ebony suit, fine red tie, hair clean and bound with just a couple strands wandering free for flavor. Soul patch, wingtip Derbies clicking heels to the floor. So the fact that Genji had walked up on him without a sound despite having feet clearly composed of black plastic meant nothing, McCree had the security of looking like a misplaced opera date.

 

 _Ease down_ , he swore to himself, shutting his eyes, kicking the hothead Deadlock out. When he looked again, Genji was holding out his fractional black hand.  McCree swiftly realized those fingers were fascinating. Weapons were fascinating, and here was one with five visibly jointed digits interlocking with a white palm, twining from there into the gray fibers of the wrist. Genji’s fingers curled a couple times in demand. McCree responded with about as much thought about it as a Pavlovian test subject, plucking a card from his breast pocket and dispensing it to Genji’s waiting hand.

 

“Howdy,” he added weakly, as the charge oozed back out of his nerves. Despite its business card trappings, McCree’s offering only featured the words _propriety six_ on the front. Genji turned it over. He reached for his short sword, seized another card trapped in the sheath, and flipped it out to McCree between two fingers. _Viking eleven._ McCree accepted it without terrible scrutiny. “You remember me, don’tcha?” he wondered at the cyborg’s silence.

 

Genji tapped the back of the card McCree had given him. An iridescent eagle appeared momentarily in the threads.

 

“Jesse,” he answered.

 

“Hey yeah there you go, though honestly most folks just use McCree.”

 

Genji left him, down the blue hallway and out of sight around a corner. McCree dragged his hand over the top of his neat brown hair, looked down at the card in his hand and flapped it once. On the back was the specter of a little garden bird, like a finch or a sparrow (he wasn’t so good with non-raptors). He pocketed the bird and swung around to face the atrium, widening his stance till his silhouette read commanding, in control.

 

He measured his foot against the pink slippers bunched in the corner of the atrium floor-- no dice. A sign hanging on the wall above the slippers read _Welcome to our bed breakfast, real Japanese guest house_ in English. The Japanese characters underneath were somewhat more comprehensive. McCree took the deed for the estate from his trouser pocket and folded it between the welcome sign and the wall.

 

The estate was not large enough to be a Shimada summer home. Living quarters, the master bedroom-- where he estimated Genji had fled --were wrapped in the oceanic outer corridor. Only the atrium lit holograms on the wall when someone entered. The two small bathrooms were sliding plasmetal doors with tree bark pasted over them, leading to a closet with the toilet and sink. The kitchen and laundry rested in a separate building linked by the shuttered walkway, so the noises associated with either space did not pollute the rest of the house. The main bath was linked direct to the master bedroom. He heard there was a hot spring out back in the woods somewhere. He heard it was frequented by pink-nosed monkeys.

 

A painting caught his eye as he approached the bedroom: mostly white space, but a line of large striped feathers floated down the center, or maybe it was a time lapse of a single feather that never quite touched the imaginary floor. How had he missed the piece when he was casing the estate earlier? The other side of the hall was a mural sliding wall, red oni and rust-colored dragon statues with green vines overtaking them, colors intense enough to taint the snowy backdrop of the feather painting.

 

Genji sat on a tatami mat inside, one knee bent to his chest, McCree’s card being turned over in his mechanical hand.

 

“They’re neat, aren’t they?” McCree asked as he stepped out of his shoes.

 

“I was trying to think of how I would tell one was fake.” Genji lifted the card to the keel of his helmet, sniffing. “You wrote this in Magic marker.”

 

“Is there an approved writing utensil now?” McCree laughed, though the back of his neck flushed. He unbuttoned his suit jacket and squatted next to the cyborg. “I promise I’m real. I’ll prove it to ya. Go ahead and grab the requisition you were told to bring for me.” He mimed the shape with his hands. Genji’s green visor leveled at him. Now the heat moved into McCree’s ears. “Come on, you can’t tell me they forgot…”

 

Genji’s synthesizer could sigh. His chest sunk in expressive harmony. He got up smooth and silent, advancing on the corner futon closet. A long sloped sword with a black handle and a leathery brown sheath leaned on the closet frame. Genji’s feet left imprints in the tatami. All of this paled to the jaw-clenching narrowness of the drawer Genji opened at the closet’s base.

 

But his movements had a way of defying natural law: Genji’s dark hands plunged into the paper-thin drawer opening, and pulled free a widebrim hat without any visible crumpling. He patted the edges to clear the suggestion of dust. He brought it to McCree, holding it up higher than he needed to, like he meant to land it over the cowboy’s crown himself.

 

“I believe you,” he said.

 

“Aren’t you sweet,” McCree grunted, his stomach only just ceasing its double dutch of true terror. He peeked in a finger to either side of the hat and raised it from Genji’s grip, clearing the last few inches over his lean cut hair. “How could ya think I was a fake?”

 

“You misspelled ‘property’ on your card.”

 

McCree ran his thumb around the hat’s ornamented top band. He flicked his fingers out to either side.

 

“It’s ‘propriety’,” he corrected.

 

“Is that a word?”

 

“Yeah, it’s uh…” McCree’s hand signs wilted as he considered. “ _Kenkyo_? Means behaving like you’re supposed to.” Genji was looking way down, at his feet. McCree tipped his head to follow the leader, clamping a hand on his hat when it started to glide off.

 

McCree was wearing deep red socks, with broncos printed on them.

 

“The ops server says it was supposed to be ‘property’.”

 

“Aw, c’mon Genji, give me a break--”

 

Genji laughed. It sounded painful as all hell to get out. But the visor pointed at him and McCree gentled his smile in time, a smooth press of lips for his junior agent. “How you feelin’?”

 

“I don’t understand.”

 

“How’d the flight down treat you? You tired?”

 

“No.” Reverting to drone-esque monosyllabic. McCree waved his hand in front of his nose and cheeks, bending a little to look Genji more in the visor.

 

“You got a face?” he demanded. “Help me out here.” Genji touched the front of his helmet as though he had forgotten it was there. The Shimada in the organization’s files would have proceeded to tell McCree to fuck off and he could wear what he liked.

 

Genji reached back with both hands to decouple his faceplate, taking it off into his palms. “That’s much better,” McCree drawled on reflex. Genji’s ashen eyes focused on him. The pupil points did not look as relaxed as he would have liked, but it was good to see the dutiful attention. _Propriety._ The light gray brow of the helmet crest loomed over the bridge of Genji’s nose. Black hair jutted here and there from the temples of the frame. He could trace the elegant taper of the cheekbones from the file photo. All of it was riddled with scars, paced across cheeks and nose and brow like the static whorls of a river. Smoke-lines split his eyebrows, creased his coral lips, but never quite distorted the architecture of each feature, just scrawled over the canvas with gray and tan Crayola. “You shy about it?”

 

Another question Genji did not know what to do with. Gray eyes dropped to the faceplate in his hand.

 

“No,” he decided.

 

“Since you’re feeling okay, let’s go out.” Everything needed to make Genji appear surprised still worked. Missed the pop of the eyeliner from the file photo though. “Don’t reckon you’re much of a country mouse.”

 

“The mission starts tonight?” Genji’s eyes targeted him, and McCree started feeling a little mouse-like himself. Without an immediate affirmative reply, Genji spoke again, defining the terms: “If not I have nowhere I need to go.”

 

McCree’s fingers spread at his sides, reaching just a bit after Genji. He calculated his options.

 

“It’s mission-related. Just go ahead and get dressed, and we can go.” The cyborg pulled on the sleeveless shoulder of his orange uniform, then let the fabric snap back against his collar. “Nah, real people clothes. Where’re your bags?” Genji led the way to the futon closet, but let McCree squat to open the other drawers underneath. The hems of his suit trousers rose up his ankles, exposing the entirety of his socks, and Genji rested his hand in front of his mouth. “You like ‘em?” McCree challenged. Genji laughed again, and this time it was a warm campfire in winter. “Well let’s see what monstrosities Gabe saddled you with then,” he hummed as he pulled out a brown duffel and unzipped the top. “Hold up…these aren’t black.” He lifted out a safety orange hoodie.

 

Draping the sweater over his arm, he fished through the rest of the clothing and found some pale jeans and a dark blue shirt. Genji leaned past him and tweezed out a length of white scarf, which he cradled to his chest. McCree tossed the rest at him. “Go on.” Genji reached to the back of his uniform collar, and the sticky detachment of a nanofiber cuff sounded in the air. “Hey!” McCree squawked. Genji peered at him, arm still posed behind his head. McCree lifted his chin at the sliding wall to their right, the one with an off-model Great Wave of Kanagawa sloshing across in purple-blue gradient. “I don’t want to watch you. Use the bathroom.”

 

Genji dropped his arm, but he lingered beside McCree. His chest was going a little fast, bird-like. McCree sucked in his lower lip, and was about to ask what was wrong when Genji took off and let himself through the sliding wall, shutting it tight behind him.

 

McCree’s shoulders sagged. He puffed his cheeks and blew out his breath in a ragged sigh.

 

After a few seconds’ further vigil on the wave door, he went back to searching the duffel. Rooted through the clothes, noted he would have to take Genji to buy more. Closed the main compartment and opened the side pouch: tourist maps of the region, and a damaged Pachimari which had a felt band-aid stitched to the stump of its missing tentacle. McCree’s hand passed over the plush, then returned, pulling it free. He pursed his lips at the onion alien’s innocuous smile. It was just the right size…

 

Nah. No way. He put it back.

 

On the back of the side pouch he found the soft imprint of six dots in the fabric. He grasped the duffel wall tight and pushed his ID code into the dots, the nanomachines masquerading as bag fibers unwinding and opening to a third compartment. McCree extracted a slim black datapad, which he pocketed, and a compact box of bullets. Red-tipped revolver ammunition, a stack of six. An inch-long piece of paper folded in the box lid said _Be kind_. He did not recognize the handwriting.

 

He shook the box to see if the bullets rattled: they were silent. He tucked the cargo into the inner breast pocket of his suit jacket. Datapad and ammo box would go into his ID-locked glove compartment when he got the opportunity, and after tonight would reside in his Hanamura apartment. The nanomachines sewed the gap up on their own. McCree zipped the side pouch and headed over to the wave door. “Meet me out front. You don’t need the sword.”

 

“Okay.” Genji’s synth echoed, probably off bathroom tiles.

 

The cyborg took long enough that McCree was able to secure his other items, and pick some vegetables. A bird sat behind his idling car on the head of a stone snake bamboo holder, or maybe it was a poorly rendered dragon. The featherduster tweeted into the pitch winter, unanswered. He was starting to conceive of its lonely heart as a Bastion unit revving its cannon when Genji came through the shutters and it took off.

 

Genji stood next to the SUV’s back door. McCree reached out the open window (he’d been smoking) and adjusted his side mirror. Genji backed up, circled around through the headlights, and got in the front passenger door.

 

“Mind the tomatoes, darlin’.” Genji’s feet clicked together, edging away from the plastic grocery bag McCree had stowed by the cupholders on the passenger side. The cyborg stuck his finger into the neck of the bag and examined the contents. Black hair hung around his face, straight and unstyled. He must have found a hairbrush in the bathroom to conquer any impression his helmet frame left. McCree wagged his hand at a couple dials on the median console as he guided the car onto the access road. “Seat warmers there, if you get cold.”

 

A distant encroachment of purple clouds promised snow. The hillside billowed out beneath them like a black skirt. Past the next outcrop a few kilometers away, civilization raised an electric aurora.

 

“Where are we?” Genji asked.

 

“Guess we can’t call ya the inside man for this job,” McCree teased. Genji looked down at the segmented hands protruding from his sweater sleeves.

 

“I did not leave the village often.”

 

“It’s okay, amigo. I’ll help ya out. Mount Fuji is over there. See ‘er cutting the stars out?” That was how they defined things in the Hanamura night: by what went missing, and which shadow grew tall enough to serve as gravestone for a god. Fuji-san’s snowcap revealed itself in the waning starlight when Genji squinted high enough. “So Hanamura is that way too.”

 

“But where…” Genji ducked his head to peer out the passenger window. They drove alongside an incline covered in dark trees. “Stop, stop!” he shouted. Wind gushed across McCree’s face, blowing his hat off.

 

 _“Passenger has made an unexpected exit of the vehicle,_ ” the SUV informed him as it activated the auto-brake. The jets cooled over the shoulder, the passenger door creaking back and forth.

 

“Genji?” McCree leaned toward the empty passenger seat, staring out the door. His hand dropped onto the seat leather for balance, then tore away. The seat was burning hot. He thumbed the passenger seat warmer off max, sniffling in the freezing air. “Shit!”

 

Forty minutes after first contact and he had lost his cyborg.

 

He palmed his hat back on. Glanced at his glove compartment-- but he had not been hired to make garbage resolutions. He did not even have the Peacekeeper on him, just a snub-nosed compact meant to escape silhouette checks, an artifact of his day job. A red bullet would not fit. McCree got out of the car and popped the floor cover in his trunk, digging a long flashlight from the car aid kit. Smacking the trunk of the tool clicked it on, and he waved it around the roadside slush till he found a footprint.

 

“Lock it,” he growled as he stalked away from the SUV. In his haste, he did not think about the jacket he left in the back seat.

 

“ _I understand._ ”

 

McCree followed the depressions in the earth.

 

“Goddamnit,” he hacked as he shoved through a crux of nettle bushes, their bereft branches screeching across his tailoring. He panned the flashlight back and forth, but the footsteps were lost to last autumn’s leaf litter. “GENJI!” Should have brought the jacket from the back seat. Should have told Genji to wear a seatbelt. He had seen the cyborg bolting around at the party. Being aware of tics was the whole point of risking a return to Geneva. _Stupid._ Could Gabriel line up both shotguns with his head or would only one fit?

 

He heard water, and dragged himself toward it, starting to shake from the cold. The fluid whisper was so indifferently delicate he had to grab his upper arms and hold his breath to keep track of it. Another kilometer and he trudged onto the diminutive tributary of some greater river winding through an imposing gallery of cedars. The shore fluxed between sand and rocks. Standing on one of the sand bars: safety orange. He lunged for the figure, staggering to a stop at the cyborg’s side. Genji had his hands in the front pockets of his hoodie and was gazing across the stream.

 

McCree had a fearsome need to grab Genji’s shoulders to confirm he was real. “Genj-- !“ he panted.

 

“I heard your voice. Was there something you needed?”

 

“Wh-what the hell…” McCree held an arm over his stomach, bending double as his teeth chattered. Genji turned to him, tilting his head at McCree’s trembling shoulders. McCree glared into the Shimada’s pale eyes. “You goin’ after Hanzo?”

 

“I do not have my sword.”

 

“I know I just…thought you were being really passionate or something.” McCree flapped his arm in an illustration of passion.

 

“No. I became confused. I’m sorry. This is Aoyama Mountain, isn’t it? The river is weak and small.” Insulting inadequately majestic geographic features sounded like a very different Shimada, and McCree laughed even if the frost burnt his lungs for it. “We should return to the car.” Genji sounded concerned.

 

“Yeah, sure.” McCree swallowed. “Glad you’ve talked me into it.” Genji took the flashlight from him; it had been starting to stick to his hand. The cyborg kept the light close, white circle wavering back and forth across the black feet protruding from his jeans.

 

“You are not a Soldier like Mr. Reyes.”

 

“Hell no. I’m just Jesse McCree, the one and only.” He rubbed his arms, trying to eke out a deeper volume. “The real McCree.”

 

“Why did they want you?”

 

“Long story short, I have good eyes.”

 

Genji looked sharply at him over the hoodie’s shoulder. McCree made his fingers into a gun and aimed at the knot of some unlucky tree, snapping his thumb down then rocking the whole hand back in recoil.

 

Genji was quiet for the rest of the walk to the car. McCree keyed up his seat warmer and collapsed upon his leather throne. He stretched his hand into the median compartment and his cigar box, resting his fingers on the etched wood a couple minutes. “Where _were_ you going?” he groaned. Genji took too long to answer, and the senior agent roused from his halfhearted nap against the warm cushions. Talented eyes noticed Genji’s lips trying out different answers before he settled on one.

 

“My family had…a picnic spot.”

 

“Wow.” McCree keyed up the ignition. “Picnics huh, how wholesome.” Genji sank in against his own chair.

 

McCree drove a minute with one finger tapping the rim of the steering wheel, gritting up the right half of his teeth. “Hey Genji,” he grunted.

 

“Yes?”

 

“That Pachimari in your bag…”

 

“Angela gave it to me!” The statement was so lighthearted it sounded like it belonged to another person.

 

“When? You didn’t see her during training, right?”

 

“No. She gave it to me to say goodbye, at Winston’s graduation ceremony.”

 

“Son of a _bitch._ ” He tapped the door lock key, and kept tapping it even though he could hear the muffled clunks of the locking mechanisms joining in place each time. “Alright, new rules. We wear seatbelts in the car. I’m the senior agent, so you listen to me, and you ask permission before picnics.” Genji fidgeted in his seat. “What are you doing?”

 

“I am putting on my seatbelt.”

 

“Yeah, alright.” McCree dragged his over his chest and buckled it, sniffing. He could make out Genji watching him in his peripheral, scarred face drawn. The hovercar cleared the final hip of the mountainside to expose a village. Looming at the south end of heaven was a power plant like a giant refrigerator block, its windowless gray face illuminated by blue spotlights, strings of meter-thick wires spooling out of its flanks into the surrounding earth. The mountain they drove across was emblazoned in caricature form on the plant, with its own icy light, and characters underneath: _Aoyama Power._ English too, typography stretched thin, the middle letter bigger and resembling a meeting of two rivers: AYP.

 

McCree parked at the train station outside of town. He did not have to grab any hoods, Genji did not try to get out. They sat under the dirty spotlight of a parking lot lamp, looking through the touristy opening stretches of the village toward the metal monolith.

 

“Jesse, there are many enemies on this mountain.”

 

McCree lit a cigar.

 

“Yeah, the Aoyama clan? They would be a problem. But, Hanzo’s first act as family head was to eradicate all of them. Well, _all_ is a bit strong. He left the kids so they could squabble themselves into ruin. He bought their remaining properties, so it’s his mountain now. Not that he cares about much outside the village, mind.” He eased down his window and exhaled a trail of steam and smoke into the amber air. Genji leaned forward in his seat, hands perching over the locked glove compartment, looking through the tinted upper layer of the SUV windshield.

 

“You will have me attack the power plant.”

 

“You got it. You’re gonna turn Hanamura dark and piss off the management’s pocketbook.” McCree’s grin was all canines and smoke. “Then you’re gonna get up to all kinds of trouble. Two birds and a goddamn baseball bat.” Genji withdrew to his seat.

 

“I should face Brother.”

 

“It’s revenge to you, but the organization needs justice. Remove Hanzo with no greater plan, someone else takes his place. Actually his tactics with the Aoyamas were ideal…”

 

“Overwatch wants to clear a path.”

  
“Yeah.” McCree chewed over his cigar. He chuckled, and Genji blinked at him. He waved the smoke out from under his hat. “Almost forgot who I was working for,” he explained. “Come on.” He opened his door.

 

“You said the mission does not begin now,” Genji murmured as he followed his senior agent out.

 

“Still doesn’t. I’m taking you to get a burger.” McCree smiled, stamping out his cigar and straightening in the lamplight. He held onto the frame of the SUV, blowing out a final coil of silver.

 

Genji watched him bend into the backseat and get his jacket-- red, matched the tie -–and listened to him curse at the state of his muddy shoes and suit full of dangling threads. He started to pinch up his hood, but McCree caught him. “If you want to look like you are hiding,” he warned. “Though I’m reminded, call me Adam in public. That’s what’s on my ID here.”

 

“Adam,” Genji tested. He dropped the hood. They moved in and out of yellow street lamp circles, a couple of autumn leaves rolling along with purpose. The blue-studded bullet of the train slid by on their left and arced onto a bridge over town, racing into the distance. Hanamura. "You don't smell like smoke, Adam."

 

"Huh. Maybe Mercy blessed ya with an insensitivity. Now here, take a look.” McCree pointed up. Genji strained at the sky, glanced at McCree with lips questioning, then tried again. “Right there,” McCree pointed when Genji made no confirming noises. 

 

Past the field of light pollution and the shadow of the power plant, the night yawned purple and starless, clouds blanketing everything now. But somewhere the technology-studded moon still worked, and a trace of its light gleamed off a line across the air, a meteorite that never crashed. Genji’s chest swelled, his mouth flattened, holding his breath till saw the same line a second time, slightly shifted, rippling east. “There’s lots of ‘em, you just have to keep watching,” McCree offered.

 

“What are they?” 

 

“Solar lines from the plant. They stick out of the top, see?” An old man’s head of generously uncombed hair. “They collect the sunlight from beyond the mountain. You can fly a plane through ‘em and nothing happens too, they’re hardlight tech.” The flashes of spectral silk reflected in Genji’s eyes, a passing of faraway dragons. 

 

“What will happen to them when I destroy the plant?”  

 

“I guess they’ll fall.” McCree scrubbed the back of his head. “Shoulda thought of that before I showed ‘em to you.” Genji smiled at him, sweet as rain at the height of summer, a shower cracked through with lightning.

 

“Thank you for showing me.”

 

The village entry was marked by a handful of restaurants and stalls, most closed for the hour, but a couple diners still open. McCree staged himself in front of the one with the red eaves.

 

“Here?” He jammed his thumb at the glass door, which glowed with a hamburger stencil. Genji turned, his face caught in the white light from the interior, a tragedy with gray eyes. McCree noticed his dark fingers bundling into fists.

 

“Yes,” he agreed.

 

“That’s the spirit darlin’.”

 

Inside the diner, a burger with rice buns, avocado, and a cheap demi-glace sat intact and steaming on a plate in front of Genji. He kept squeezing his fingertips together, staring at it.

 

McCree hoovered up his own gyudon bowl and octopus sushi, rubbing a tear of appreciation from the corner of his eye. His earlier survey of Aoyama had indicated this was the only place in town that risked strong spices in their food.

 

Genji stared at him-- no, past him, cocking his head at something.

 

“You gonna eat that?” McCree asked as he leaned back and scraped his soul patch with a napkin. Genji ignored him, trying to sit up high enough to see over his shoulder. McCree advanced his hand across the table. “You want to watch me eat it?” Genji stiffened in front of him. The cyborg searched McCree’s eyes, then dipped his chin in acquiescence. McCree flicked his hat up with his thumb and grabbed Genji’s burger, transferring it to his empty bowl to dip it in the remaining sauce. Genji’s shoulders acted out a silent protest, and McCree attacked the burger through a grin.

 

Articulated fingers crept over the side of the table and clung loosely to the tabletop. McCree hesitated once as a cover of a decade-old country song piped through the tacky red box speakers on the walls, and Genji’s mouth fell open in horror. The senior agent rolled his shoulders and dug back in.

 

“You gotta be able to eat something,” he prompted when there were only a couple inches of burger left. “Your mouth ain’t watertight.” Genji picked up a knife next to his plate. McCree held his hands up. Genji braced his elbow on the table edge and leaned over, inserting the knife through the burger bun a safe few millimeters from McCree’s nearest bite scar. He cut out a wedge of patty, leaving McCree his own gnawed-up crumbles to clean off. Balancing the triangle of food on the knife flat, Genji brought it to his lips and kissed it off.

 

“Small amounts,” he said, after he swallowed.

 

“Oh, so it’s not the end of the world then.” McCree peeked pointedly at the two untouched glasses of ice water at the center of the table. Genji picked one up and sipped out a precise quarter of the contents. He closed his eyes when he swallowed this time.

 

“Anything,” he murmured, licking his lips. “To not be like that.” He lifted his chin at the mystery entity behind McCree. Since cowboy hats telegraphed quite a bit and Genji seemed full, McCree stole the water glass and prodded it out to the edge of their table. He rubbed his tongue against a canine tooth as he studied the reflection.

 

The diner’s only other patron at this hour was an omnic sitting cross-legged in another of the retro red booths. Its order was identical to Genji’s, a hot burger-- though the patty was vegetarian. Its gleaming silver head did not possess a mouth, only a lip-like seam that approximated a human face. Two black slots slanted down from the center of the faceplate, a triple-row of dim lights winking on what would have been the forehead. Its hands posed a relaxed mudra in front of its chrome chest. McCree thought the omnic was not moving otherwise, but like the solar lines a flash of light tipped him off to the chain of etched orbs resting around its neck, one turning and nuzzling its neighbor.

 

“’Fraid you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he advised Genji. “We got one more stop. Let’s head out.”

 

Though at a distance it looked like Aoyama Power abutted the town, a forest of noise-canceling oaks was planted in symmetric rows between the two. McCree led the way through the hall of trees to the perimeter fence, where a buried lockbox yielded a tactical visor. He handed the equipment to Genji, squatting down next to him as he struggled to put it on. The visor did not fit him like the customized second skin of his own helmet. Rather than helping, McCree squeezed the ankle of his soggy, threadbare trousers.

 

“I have retrieved satellite surveillance and blueprints from the ops server,” Genji noted as he finally locked the clasps together at the back of his head. The visor pinged on, two blue dots lining up on the view panel over the cyborg’s eyes. From the inside, the visor’s nightvision started black and white and rendered color for notable temperatures. The snow dripping from the oaks was blue.

 

“No substitute for your own eyes,” McCree grunted. “The human experience of it.” He flapped melted snow off his hand. Genji looked out at the plant complex. “They have a handful of stun drones and a couple security foremen to go with them. It’s probably the softest target you’re going to hit in this operation, despite its importance. Hanzo should have fixed it up a long time ago, but he’s been distracted.”

 

“By what?”

 

“In the general sense,” McCree allowed. He ducked his head, breath washing out silvery from his lips. The winter coat kept him from shaking. Aoyama Power was not nearly as high up the mountain as Genji’s ideal picnic spot either. “First missions go down like a cactus in your throat. This one’s mostly trashing infrastructure, but there will be some technicians along with the foremen. Can you handle it, Genji?”

 

“Security? Yes. I have been trained.”

 

“I don’t want to place doubt on your upbringing, or insult the quality of your teachers, but have you ever actually stuck a pretty sword in someone?”

 

“Yes. When I was thirteen.”

 

“Really? ‘Cause it’s not in your file.”

 

“An assassin was sent after my brother and I, to our room in the night. I killed him.” Genji made a diagonal cut across his gray neck with the side of his hand. “That kind of body would not be reported on the news.”

 

“Huh. So self-defense, then. Well that’s understandable.”

 

Genji’s electric blue eyes fixed dutifully on the power plant, but his shoulders sank. McCree heard his synthesizer fluttering, and he smiled just in case. “It’s alright. Probably the best reason, if you have to kill someone. Hopefully you can get through this without even being seen, but if not at least you have something more than holograms under your belt.”

 

“And you, Jesse? You are not an old man.” Genji did look at him, and McCree’s smile had fallen off for surprise. He mushed the back of his hat in, chuckling.

 

“You don’t think so huh? Unfortunately I had to defend myself a lot earlier and a lot more often than thirteen. Since then, I guess it’s my bad habit. I just keep getting myself into these situations where the only way out is a gun.” Little white reflections of light began falling out of the lowest tree branches and between him and Genji. He could not make out Genji’s face in the dark. “In that sense this assignment’s been a vacation I guess, but I worry it will make my aim scratchy. Can’t really have that when the only thing I’m good for is my eyes.”

 

“I will try to see things the way you do.”

 

“I’d appreciate that. Hey, look. Our cover is here.” Genji took off the blue-eyed visor, investigating the flecks of snow. “You all set?”

 

“I am prepared.” Genji looked into the hole the visor came from.

 

“Leave it. We can’t very well walk back through town with it. Besides, I have a whole cache of the damn things.”

 

Genji placed the visor back in its coffin and scraped frost and dirt over it. Snow began falling in earnest, and as they departed their footprints disappeared behind them.

 

“Would Angela like this kind of place as you do?” Genji asked as they passed the red diner in reverse. Glowing pink characters read _Closed_ on the door. McCree could not recall ever seeing Mercy getting personal. She did sometimes accompany the Strike Commander to business dinners. She wore long white dresses to restaurants whose names he could not pronounce.

 

There was a note in Genji’s _as you do_ he did not care for.

 

“Yeah-mmh,” he coughed. “Can’t say she would appreciate the nutrition involved.” Or the décor. Or the price. “Hey, you want some bad food, I’ll make you chili sometime. Not to say all chili is bad, just mine.”

 

“You sound very proud of it.”

 

“It’s a bad you remember. For days after the fact.”

 

Genji was laughing again.

 

McCree walked ahead when they arrived at the train station, and held open the passenger door for Genji. That got the cyborg smiling as he got in. He slumped against the door on the ride back and McCree almost thought he was catching a nap. But on a check-up as he turned from paved to dirt roads, he noticed the reflection of open eyes in the window. What Genji’s conditioning file said was probably accurate: without specific medical intervention, he did not sleep.

 

Genji froze in front of the estate welcome sign in the atrium, keen to the piece of holofilm stuffed behind it.

 

“This tourist trap is yours now,” McCree noted. He got one foot out of a ruined shoe, only to think aloud: “I bought you some candles for tomorrow.” Shoes back on, he trudged out to the SUV and got the candle case from the trunk. A twelve-pack of waxy Buddhas in lollipop colors.

 

When he came back Genji was gone, and the deed still pinned behind the sign. McCree headed to the bedroom. Genji had switched on the light for him. He heard rustling in the bathroom. “It’s late to drive back to my place, so I’ll bunk up here if that’s alright with you,” he informed the wall. “My work shift starts at noon tomorrow. I’ll be out of your hair by eleven.”

 

“It’s fine,” Genji’s muffled voice came back to him. McCree opened the futon closet, pulling out two mattresses despite the ugly truths of the cyborg situation. He laid the futons at ends with each other, a comfortable meter of space between.

 

Genji came out while he was fluffing his pillow. Safety orange-- no, Overwatch colors, the official uniform again. Genji spoke first: “Where will you be while I am on-mission?”

 

“Oh, yeah…” McCree hiccuped. Genji headed over by the drawers to retrieve and assemble his helmet frame. McCree loosened his tie. “I am the inside man. So, I’ll be with Hanzo.” Genji’s fingers stuck on the frame clasps, clicking them into place on delay, his eyes all over McCree. “I’m pretty easy to pass as a security goon, don’t you think?”

 

“He hired you? An American?”

 

“He tolerates me.” McCree moistened the corner of his lip.

 

“Looking like that?” Genji demanded.

 

“Well, not exactly no.” McCree rolled his shoulders out of his red jacket and removed his hat, holding it to his chest. “I appear a right gentleman.” He rested his fingers at the back of his slick hair and freed the tie.

 

“He must not have noticed the socks.”

 

“I think like the organization, he appreciates my eyes more than anything else. Would probably be the top man by now if that honor weren’t reserved for locals.” He shook his trousers off one leg at a time, unbuttoned his shirt, snugged his legs under the futon covers, and gave a belated thanks to heaven that he had picked the gray boxers today instead of flag print.

 

“You have protected Hanzo,” Genji hissed as he pulled his faceplate up. The green visor sprang to life and turned on McCree.

 

“Hate to tell ya, but not doing my job compromises my cover. Got strict orders to save him for your sword. I just gather intel, and I take care of you. Besides, I’m not sure I could take him. Heard he’s got a nasty lizard on his side. Though I’ve never seen it…” McCree propped his elbow on the air and couched his chin in his palm, leaning at the recruit.

 

The light in Genji’s eyeframe wavered. He pulled his wakizashi from its careless brace against the wall painted like a deep forest, and slung it over his hips.

 

“How long have you protected him?”

 

“Been here for two… I guess goin’ on three years now.” Genji drew his longer sword from its sheath, holding it to his right for examination. Waves of black fangs styled the cutting edge. Genji pulled the sheath over his back. “And since you’re here, the mission won’t go on much longer. We can go home.” Silent still, Genji flipped the sword toward its leathery niche and started sliding it in. It looked like the cyborg was inserting his own ragged spine. “What’re you doin’?” McCree finally advanced. “You remember what we talked about…?”

 

The side of the visor turned at him.

 

“Go to sleep, Jesse,” Genji ordered. Was that synthesizer supposed to be soothing? “I am going out back to practice. I will not wake you, I promise.” McCree crushed the top of the covers in his fists, shoulders knotting. _As you do._

 

“Yeah…” he grumbled. “You don’t have to coddle me just ‘cause I ain’t a superhero.” McCree was a decent talker. The Deadlock in him was not. “I ain’t a baby neither.”

 

The visor glowed, and Genji pressed the final inch of sword down with a mechanical _click_.

 

“I am aware of just what you are.”

 

Genji turned the light out on McCree’s red cheeks, striding past his futon, visor a green wil-o’-wisp in the shadows. He quietly and politely opened and closed the sliding wall to let himself out. McCree sensed a scolding hovering in the dense, dark air around him. He leaned over and folded his clothes, unloading the compact from his chest holster, shoving the bullets under his pillow. The Tooth Fairy was in for a hell of a surprise.

 

The estate grounds rested around him like a tomb. When he finally fell asleep, it was to a dream of Genji out under the cold and heartless moon, hacking apart nettles and trees he turned into men with his eyes.

 

Genji woke him at nine, on the pretense he might have to get some new clothes at his apartment before work.

 

“You’re right,” McCree sighed, lounging his arms over his head. “Thank you kindly…” Genji left the room. The other futon’s cover was completely undisturbed. As McCree sat up, he noticed his hat was about a meter from where he had left it. He got off the mattress to collect it. A few dead leaves were trapped in the band. After he slipped together a few buttons of his shirt, he reached for his holster. It was empty.

 

McCree spun around on the red heels of his socks, searching the tatami. All he found were the stamps of Genji’s feet, over every meter of the room, especially all around his futon.

 

The compact rested under the painting in the hallway. Feather, feather, feather, gun. McCree checked the magazine: loaded with five bullets. Snarling, he went back to the futon and lifted his pillow, then dug around the sheets, eventually tearing the covers off, turning the mattress over, and otherwise making a fool of himself.

 

Genji sat on a tall yellow stool at the kitchen’s prep island, his arms crossed on the flowery pink tabletop and his helmet resting over them. He wore the gray and black copy of the Overwatch uniform he would be using for the mission, the version that was sans logos and the organization’s primary colors. McCree walked the table perimeter and flipped on the coffee machine. His pre-UFO expedition onto the estate included stocking the pantry.

 

“Where is it?”

 

Genji’s helmet lifted a little.

 

“I do not know what you are talking about, Jesse.”

 

McCree continued assembling his coffee, back to the cyborg.

 

“See, that’s not gonna work,” he advised. “That’s what will get you sent back to the organization.” Genji did not reply. “Did you eat it?” McCree growled. “Do I have to search for it?”

 

“I would like to see you try.”

 

“We’re talking about this when I come back tonight. Count on it.”

 

Genji watched him drink his coffee. Since there were no bullet shapes mixed with the coffee grounds, McCree relaxed. He put on the face of a relaxed man. “You want anything? Eggs?” Genji shook his head. “There’s a generator in the closet. Put it up when you get back and it will keep the fridge going.”

 

The junior agent saw him out to the car. “See you tonight,” McCree cracked flatly.

 

“Goodbye.”

 

He wagged his arm as the SUV glided down the driveway, adjusting the rearview for a better angle on Genji as he departed. The ninja remained at the base of the car’s jet tracks, alone in front of the estate’s wave of closed storm shutters, visor tipped at his toes. When McCree reached his apartment he released the glove compartment lock and transferred the untouched black datapad and the ammunition case to the cache under the floorboards of his hall closet. He went back out to the car and grabbed the bag of tomatoes, throwing them in the vegetable bin of his fridge only to hear a _clink_ on impact.

 

The bullet was in the bag.

 

* * *

 

Midnight.

 

Agent McCree drove through a black Hanamura. A few traditional souls put paper lanterns in their windows, but most of the skyscrapers had become dark obelisks of paralysis. The SUV’s headlights stretched a hundred miles down empty streets, two white fingers reflecting on the eyes of surprised cats. Someone’s trash bin was getting raided a couple blocks down when he parked the car. Children’s voices echoed from even further away, so distorted by the time they reached the little yard past his apartment gate he could not tell if they were laughing or screaming.

 

He touched his keycard to the door panel, then retracted it. Right. He went back to the car and got a little golden key he never used out of the glove compartment. The apartment opened up. McCree dropped his travel case by the front door, got a flashlight out of the coat closet. His tiny bubble of light wandered back and forth along the carpet to the kitchen, flashing across the brass feet of a lion statuette, the legs of his couch, a four-month-old coffee stain. Fish eyes bobbled uncertain silver at him from a stagnant aquarium. Felt familiar, like robbing his own house.

 

In the kitchen he set the flashlight down on a blue flower countertop and opened the cabinet with all his wine and shot glasses, rifling between the rows to reach the fresh cigar box hidden under the folded placemats at the back. Beneath the floor panel of the box sat a strip of clear holofilm that he activated with his thumb to the corner. White text lit up across the pliable surface and turned McCree’s face ghostly as he scanned through it. Unlike the hidden black datapad, the holofilm contained one-way broadcasts of details. Right now, he needed to know how much of a hurry to be in.

 

_OBJ: 100% A. 100% B._

_EXT: COMPLETE._

_CURRENT LOC: BASE._

_MEDC: NONE._

_ELIM: … WARNING: Subject terminated connection with Server 7201.23 prior to completing report._

_**TEC NOTE: Don’t use whiskey. Aid kit has provisions._

_NEXT DTL: Calculating._

McCree decided a smoke was acceptable. He drifted outside again, walking around with hands in his pockets and a gun on the inseam of his jacket, looking for a safe place in the abyss. He settled on the bench at the children’s park, though by the sparse light the park was just incomprehensible loops of colored plastic jutting from the darkness like broken capillaries. He scratched his jaw; needed a shave.

 

When he got up it was into the start of a winter wind. The fingers of the air tugged his fresh red tie out of his jacket and dragged it off like a leash pulled so hard it drew blood. He stood still inside the uninterrupted night. Even without Hanamura’s lights, he could not see any stars. Country mouse, he thought. His peace broke when a baby started crying in the apartment complex. Who left the window open, that it could be heard out on the playground? It was too cold for a kid that age.

 

The baby’s screams were the song of his march back to the SUV. He took off in the night, under the impression that any other traveling lights he noticed in the distance were ghosts, that he was the only man left alive.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter:** I feel like a man possessed.
>   * _shochu_ : a distilled spirit, ~25% alcohol, sometimes served with hot water 
>   * _Great Wave of Kanagawa_ : a famous ukiyo-e woodblock print (of a great wave) 
>   * _Showa Day_ : April 29th, holiday honoring the birthday of Emperor Showa, emperor from 1926 to 1989 -- the first holiday in Japan's "Golden Week", which is a series of holidays ending with Children's Day on May 5th 
>   * _Fuji-san_ : a Japanese term for Mt. Fuji, the _-san_ doesn't actually mean "mister" in this case 
>   * _gyudon_ : bowl of rice topped with simmered beef and onion 
>   * _wakizashi_ : a small sword
>   * I'm a firm believer that Hanamura arcade has seen better days, and had stairs going to the third/fourth floors and stuff like a real business.
>   * Hanamura is a fictional location, though it does seem to be Mt. Fuji in the background. Based on its appearance in-game, it may be similar in location/inspiration to the real city Fujiyoshida. "Aoyama Mountain" and the associated village are fictional too, though there is a real-life Aoyama neighborhood in Tokyo. 
>   * The "waves of black fangs" on Genji's katana are tempering effects called hamon, though they are considerably fancied up on the Dragonblade (they should also properly be green but shhh more on that later).
>   * Peace be upon your burger.
> 



	4. Spirit House

 

“This is your life, Jesse?”

 

The question came as Genji stood over a basin of dark water, scrubbing pink foam off the torso of his Blackwatch uniform, while McCree stood next to him lathering the bloody legs.

 

“Yep.”

 

McCree relieved one hand from the freezing water to pinch his shot glass, dumping it back, some of the wash staining his lips along with the whiskey. Liquid smoke and blood went down better than he expected.

 

“Maybe it is not so bad.” Genji’s face turned to him, the light from the melting Buddha on the windowsill illuminating the coral burn of his smile, the flayed angle of his cheekbone, the taper of his pale eye. “You do not seem to suffer.” McCree sliced a grin back at him through his glass snout. He thumped Genji between the shoulders, stinging himself on the armor plate beneath the t-shirt, leaving a handprint on thin black fabric.

 

“That’s kind of you to say.” McCree’s palm loitered on the cyborg’s back. It was hot, like massaging his SUV’s exhaust port. He raised his thumb, a fleshy mast, to the black and silver scales protecting Genji’s neck. He chafed into moisture, and pulled the sticky hand back into the light: his thumb was red. “You sure you didn’t get hit?” Genji reached for the spot. “Don’t. I’ll get it.”

 

“I don’t feel anything there,” the cyborg wondered, his hands dropping back into the basin, floating stagnant beside his uniform. McCree got a fresh washcloth, and streamed some water from the faucet over it.

 

“This will be cold,” he warned just before wrapping his hands around Genji’s neck. He did not detect any obvious breaks, but it was hard to deduce the natural state of armor plates and synthetic neck cords. Blood matted the back of Genji’s hair. McCree reached up, scrubbing, pink water oozing into the hem of the t-shirt.

 

“I don’t feel anything,” Genji pressed, broken record. “It is not so bad…” he repeated, softer.

 

“Yeah?” McCree soothed, confident now: this was somebody else’s blood. He squatted at the side of the basin, opening the cupboard in its belly and pulling out a jug of ammonia. “Who’d you let get behind you?” he asked as he fought the childproof cap and poured the chemical into a bucket. He immediately regretted speaking, and rested the back of his hand over his nostrils.

 

“The security foreman.” Genji peeked into the bucket when McCree lifted it over the side of the basin. He beat McCree’s hand to the faucet knob and turned on the water. “I think Angela tricked me.”

 

“50-50 will do it for bloodstains,” McCree advised, calloused fingers floating above Genji’s. Genji turned off the water at the right moment, but he also tried dipping his washcloth and hand directly into the bucket. “Whoa, Genji.” The cyborg’s shoulders tightened in steely candlelit outline. “Gloves, huh?” McCree held out one of the two pairs he had scavenged from the cabinet, rubber green as leaves.

 

He endured the yellow flower prints himself. Genji’s fingers traced over limp textile counterparts, joints reflecting as he prodded the material. “Come on, no sense in not taking precautions. And this ain’t a cologne you want to be caught wearing after the fact.”

 

Genji covered his hands, coated his washcloth in ammonia solution, and lifted the uniform torso from the water. “Make little circles up and down the stain, don’t just wipe it.” McCree leaned over to inspect Genji’s work. “There you go,” he approved, pulling one of the splattered legs from the water. “What do you mean, she tricked you?”

 

“Angela…” Genji damn near swooned every time he spoke his doctor’s name. McCree sniffed. “She said that in videogames, or movies, they make a tin man by putting his brain in a jar, attaching some life support, then giving him a robot body. But in reality, she said there are systems, ‘endocrine’, that choose your reaction even faster than your brain. She said your body is part of who you are.”

 

McCree rubbed slower and slower orbits across the uniform leg in his hand. “She worried that without imitating those systems, I would not respond swift enough. She put them all back. But I think she’s wrong. It distracts me. That man came up behind me while I was distracted by another-- by one of the technicians.” Genji made vengeful little swipes against the microfiber torso. McCree’s yellow glove closed over his green one and guided him back into circles. “I should have told her to take it away.”

 

“Can’t believe I’m sayin’ this, but I agree with Mercy.” Genji’s broken eyebrows rose. “A man needs his gut instinct, which I think is what she was getting at in her…roundabout way.” Genji actually looked at his abdomen. “The other stuff that comes with it, that’s just what Gabe was supposed to work with you on.” Some of the light left Genji’s eyes, still blinking at his stomach, but before McCree could pretty up his truths, the cyborg popped up a smile.

 

“Mr. Reyes and his drones,” he sighed, almost chuckling, probably due to the ease with which the two-guns went down. That was how conditioning worked: Reyes dressed the drones up in holograms so they looked and sounded like people, but they had little more battle capacity than paper targets. Despite the knowing eye he shared with Genji, McCree had never gone through conditioning. That would imply Reyes ever held a doubt about his capacity for murder.

 

“You’re lucky the guy up your ass wasn’t a stun drone,” he noted. The euphemism referred to the drones’ use of an electric prod to level enemies, and did not speak to how they typically crushed the downed foe’s skull and spine with their piston-arms after. His prompt had the desired effect: Genji pouted, raising his voice.

 

“I am trained. I did listen to some of it. I am not going to get taken out by a toaster.”

 

“Wasn’t implying anything of the sort. Just be careful, okay? I’d like to see you come back.” And pride became a pink burn in Genji’s cheeks.

 

“Thank you. I am glad to have you with me…” Genji lifted the uniform torso from the water, stainless. McCree ran the faucet to clear the ammonia. He showed Genji how to pin the clothing up on the drying line by the shoulders. “Even if you do work for Hanzo.” Hardly the green-eyed fury from earlier. Genji’s synthesizer rasped around his brother’s name, but the tone mostly let McCree off the hook. It was almost like taking a man’s mask and dressing him in real clothes gave him the vulnerability of a genuine human animal.

 

“Think nothing of it. Speakin’ of being careful, did you have to use your dragon to put down anything at the power plant?”

 

Too early, McCree. Genji’s eyes rose from a look in his general direction to a bead on him. There was a certain fraternal resemblance. Genji’s eyebrows tightened like the string of a bow.

 

“No.” One-word replies again, not monotone because a single night with Jesse McCree had trained Genji out of that. But targeted, the tip of a sword against the liar’s heart. How the wind could change around a Shimada!

 

“Glad there was nothing worthy of the challenge.” Oh well. There would be plenty of opportunities. He would have to figure out if Genji did not want to budge on the subject because he had been eaten by a dragon-- the screaming blue pulsar erupting off the Castle grounds, shining through the lattice of garden trees like a momentary imprint of stained glass --or because he needed more faith in his guide. In McCree’s experience, fear was an easy demon, and trust was… well, he had a file on Genji Shimada. “Hand me your glass darlin’.”

 

Genji passed over the spare whiskey shot McCree had given him. It went down McCree’s throat hot as hellfire. He inhaled through his nose and exhaled through his lips, closing his eyes, but he could still make out the sunset dot of the Buddha in the night.

 

Roads through Aoyama had been blocked by the authorities. McCree had to take the long way round to the estate. The power plant looked like the first time he had seen a grenade go off: not a fireball but a lot of dust, and the rank of smoke. AYP’s outer casing remained intact, but tar aired out its pores. A fire at the peak ate the solar line tethers, and a lot of them had fallen all over town, metallic blood drilled from the moon.

 

He found Genji in the safe space he had defined for him the previous night: the bathroom off the master bed, standing under the unheated shower in his uniform, trying to get the blood and drone coolant off. First order after fresh clothes had been whiskey from the pantry, three shots and some patience. It would have made the dragon question a lot easier. He might have been able to impress Gabe with his timeliness for once.

 

But whiskey was of as little consequence to Genji as water.

 

McCree held out his yellow flower glove to cross with Genji’s green one. “Told ya, firsties go down like cactus,” he snorted.

 

“Did HQ specify the next mission?” Genji asked after a moment of silence for McCree’s metaphor.

 

“Nope. I have a long shift, I’ll be gone a couple days. They should have it by the time I return. Don’t mean to ditch ya, but there’s a wedding in Tokyo.” McCree carefully lined up the second empty shot glass next to the window Buddha, and turned around to find a shaken Genji. He wagged his hand. “Uh, not Hanzo’s,” he clarified. “He’s just attending. It’s for one of his allies, the Yanai.”

 

“Sayuki?”

 

“You know her?” Not in his damn file anywhere. McCree palmed the cigar box in his left jacket pocket, making sure it was still there. Genji paled. “You get in some trouble with Hanzo because of her?” McCree smirked.

 

“It wasn’t trouble.” Genji’s fingers worked together. “Jesse… do you know Tadao? He is one of you security men, but he is old. He is only a driver now.”

 

“Can’t say I do. Bear in mind, there were a couple shake-ups in the first year of Hanzo’s reign. Heard he was angry about how little the grunts recovered for your funeral.” McCree shrugged. “And there were a few guys that spoke up on your behalf, which would be great if they weren’t sassing the boss of the Shimada.” He got Genji all the way to a shade of milk.

 

“I am going out back to train.”

 

“Didn’t mean to upset ya.”

 

“No. I appreciate your honesty.” Genji dismissed himself.

 

McCree flicked the rim of the whiskey glass, listening to the hollow ring, thinking on the remaining gold awaiting him in the pantry. He had the light of his phone to guide him. He snapped the wick of the Buddha candle by the window, and the house that was barely there on the Aoyama hillside disappeared into the night.

 

* * *

 

“Can’t believe it,” he mulled in Genji’s direction a day and a half later. “He got up in the middle of the ceremony and _left_. Man has the world on a string and he cuts the goddamn string.”

 

* * *

 

Trust could be grown like tomatoes.

 

He had a flash of an elk in the back of a pick-up, dark eyes stuck open, legs sewn up on their own knee angles. But it was Genji on his side in the trunk space of the SUV, wrapped around his own bloody katana.

 

“It’s McCree,” he warned as he got his foot up on the bumper. “It’s me,” he repeated as he put his knee into the space, like he was contracting his own name. _It’s McCree, it’s me, it’s me, it’s me._ The sword still lifted when he tucked his hand around Genji’s clenched fingers, but fell again in synchrony with a weak “Jesse” from the green visor.

 

McCree was smarter the next time he had to pick Genji up from a mission. He brought a tarp.

 

He showed Genji how much water and plant food to bury to revive the dying front yard vegetables.

 

“Does anyone else in your family have one of those dragons?”

 

Genji led him to the hot spring in the woods behind the estate. They did not see any monkeys, but McCree refused to risk his finger when Genji asked him how warm the water was.

 

He managed to join Genji at every post-mission laundry. Genji demonstrated how to polish the wakizashi, but would not let him touch the long katana. McCree always played jazz off his phone speaker while they worked.

 

Genji stopped stealing his things when he stayed overnight.

 

“You know if you used a gun, you wouldn’t get it all over you.”

 

Spring, but it was too cold on the mountain for any trees to bloom.

 

McCree spotted a restaurant with its lights on. Ramen shop, running a generator. He brought Genji by lying and saying it was mission critical.

 

“Jesse, your hat is on backwards.” And he was laughing too, something he had not done since first mission.

 

McCree leaned on the SUV, smoking in a train station parking lot while he waited for Genji. The wind blew a cold north through his hair, he had to leave his hat in the car. He thought about _gut instinct_ and what it whispered to him in the night. Oh, and that if he heard the name _Angela_ one more time, he was going to strangle the good doctor the next time he saw her.

 

Genji came back from another mission disoriented, but he recognized McCree’s voice immediately.

 

Local news covered rumors of blood-red oni visiting from Aokigahara. Genji always cut security, so it was just coincidence. The estate was a few kilometers from the edge of the forest.

 

Genji’s body did not qualify as a substitute furnace during a power outage. McCree could only feel the heat off it when he was close enough to touch.

 

“Not much longer. They’ll let you at him soon.” Over and over again.

 

They went hunting behind the estate, but the only thing they caught was a little bird Genji nabbed from the air mid-flight. McCree made him let it go. It was not big enough to eat.

 

Oni were not born, but crafted, like swords or guns.

 

McCree told Genji the bedtime stories Gabe had passed to him, about the Omnic Crisis. He told Genji about a real live red leviathan he had seen stumping across the City of Rocks when he was small. At the end of the tales it was always Jesse that fell asleep.

 

"You still don't smell like smoke," Genji said after a long night, just as McCree was closing his eyes.

 

Genji was lying out in the forest instead of in the bathroom.

 

Genji bragged about a Bastion automaton he trashed while raiding an arms depot.

 

“Where will you spend your leave when you are done?” while he stroked Genji’s shoulder. Genji said he did not know, and leaned into his palm.

 

Technician notes from the ops server angrily insisted that he _use the aid kit provisions,_ the _really expensive whiskey,_ to prop up an ailing junior agent. McCree examined the white box with a green cross on the lid. The first drawer was bandages, cotton balls, splints, and aspirin. The second drawer had a cache of silver rods with one end flat and the other tapered. The rods were coded like his red-tipped bullet: blue, green, and white. He undid the holofilm rolled around one of the green feelgoods. “What the hell,” he muttered as the instructions projected into the air. They were written in omnic language. Was the rod meant for an omnic?

 

There were diagrams, he could follow those. Invisible buttons around the base of the rod, probably meant for electrical activation, but they could be depressed. McCree keyed them in, and a triple-prong with sharp puzzle piece tips snapped out of the rod’s tapered end. Genji grabbed his wrist with shaking fingers and pulled it down. McCree returned the rod to the case without bothering to check how it could possibly interact with the cyborg’s body.

 

“Thank you, Jesse.”

 

Genji was flawless on-mission. Nothing could touch him.

 

* * *

 

A baby in the apartment complex cried. Same one, McCree wondered, or different? His stomach tightened: same baby or _replacement_? Just keep the window open all year round, we can always make more babies.

 

There was trash in his yard: cherry blossoms. He backed up and examined the tree at the street corner, but its gray buds had yet to explode. Must have come from further up the hill, closer to Shimada Castle.

 

Golden key opened the door. He strode past a glass tank full of gravel and water (all his aquarium fish had died) and picked up a golden phone from the floor of his living room. Having the other Shimada grunts over every once in a while made sense, it maintained cover. He unlocked the phone and thumbed through the contacts, and sent a Net message under the name of the phone’s owner.

 

_cgozu21: found his phone, I’ll drop by_

_naminaminami: thank you so much!!! you going out again tonight? there is so little to do_

_cgozu21: not everything runs on electricity, or needs to_

_naminaminami: damn. teach me adam!!!_

He migrated to the kitchen, still hunched over the phone, examining the recent messages for any actionable intel. A lot of chats with a mother somewhere. McCree read them all, smiling. He thumbed open his cupboard and fished out the ops holofilm.

 

The digital clock printed on the kitchen wall ticked over to 16:00, and the absence of two real numbers at the end drew McCree’s eye. He sucked in the corner of his lip and pocketed the golden phone, shifting the holofilm into his lap as he pulled himself onto the island countertop.

 

He read the next mission instructions, and shoved the film back where it came from. He walked through the hazy sunlight making rays between his unevenly drawn curtains. As he stood in his freezing shower, closing his eyes to the rain, a _click_ heavy enough to shake the apartment woke him and he stopped the water.

_Click. Click._

Nevermind the logistics of an omnic walker showing up at an inland Japanese city without first breaching the shore defense: an omnium would understand the vulnerability of a powerless habitat, and much like a modern phone or holofilm required no charging mechanism for its own advance. Walker versus the City of Rocks.

 

Armed with a flashlight and his birthday suit, McCree dripped across his bathroom rug and down the hall to the broom closet. He started shaking from the cold as he opened the closet and scattered boxes of beaten, frayed dress shoes, burrowing his way down to the removable panel in the right corner.

 

_Click._

 

He was reaching blind, but the Peacekeeper near jumped into his fingers. He angled the flashlight (now in his mouth) at the chamber, growled happily, and crept out to the living room. Shivering, wet-haired, Jesse McCree parted the front curtain and shined the flashlight into his yard.

 

_Click!_

 

The lights turned on.

 

All of them.

 

His living room speakers started screaming in Japanese _THIS IS NOT A DRILL. THE HANAMURA AREA IS EXPERIENCING A WIDESPREAD POWER OUTAGE. PLEASE BE ADVISED_. McCree reeled away from the window, arm over his eyes, yelling, hitting a tall leg against his couch and pitching over the back of it. The aquarium heater made a belated tick to 25 degrees, and bubbles flushed from the steer skull sitting in the gravel. McCree lay on the floor with Jesus Christ and son of a bitch and fucking hell for longer than he would have liked to admit. Eventually he dragged his bruised ass back to the bathroom.

 

Meeting Genji already angry would not work. McCree made sure to bring his hat. _Routines,_ his own brain sang at him. He could not figure how to stop grinding his fingers into his steering wheel. When he stopped at _naminaminami_ ’s apartment to return the phone, he was easy to sway into a few rounds of celebratory booze. The power was back on, the boys insisted.

 

It was not his most responsible trip up the mountain. The ruins of Aoyama Power’s solar lines still coiled through its basement town, glittering under restored lamps. People moved along the roads at the outskirts, seeking rides to other Hanamura satellites for work. Even if Spring was frozen on this mountain, even if it was 23:42, the witching hour. The estate lights were still out.

 

“Genji,” he called as he let himself in the obnoxious iridescent atrium. “Give a holler darlin’, don’t just drop down behind me. Please.” He loosened his scarf and ticked the switch for the outer hall lamps. They did work. The repeating blue texture of the shutters on one side and the unpainted paper screens on the other made the corridor stretch impossibly long around him.

 

“Welcome home,” Genji responded in Japanese from around the corner. McCree felt the wind as he approached, saw the corner of a black forest exposed. An entire wall’s worth of storm shutters lay open. Genji was sitting on the perimeter, his feet resting on the outer cobbles. The cyborg’s face turned his way, and McCree was hopeful for his routine hat in evidence, but Genji stared at his boots. McCree looked over his shoulder at the trail of translucent slush prints he had left down the corridor.

 

Genji was surrounded by sticks and brown leaves and other debris blown in through the shutters, though as always the cyborg himself appeared pristine. McCree took a step into the exposed yard and seized Genji’s ankles, lifting his legs back inside the house. Obstruction removed, he replaced the storm shutters one by one.

 

“Go turn on the lights and the thermostat,” he ordered. Genji stood up, lifting his helmet out of his lap and putting it on.

 

“Mission accepted,” he said before he wandered off. McCree grit his teeth.

 

He spent some time searching for a vacuum cleaner and had just pulled out of another fruitless closet when he turned around and found Genji a breath away.

 

“God--” The cyborg’s eyeframe flashed brighter. McCree bit his lip, and maybe the end of his tongue. Exhaled, took his hands off the closet frame, and stood up out of the stack of brooms he had nearly cocooned himself in. “I’m sorry I left you alone for so long.” The green in the visor cooled. “Got an unexpected extra shift.”

 

“You are very late.” Genji tilted his head, inspecting McCree’s blue jacket, scarf, jeans, and _boot spurs_. “You changed.”

 

“Prettied myself up for ya. What’s the matter, you like it better when I smell like work?”

 

“Sometimes you smell like Hanzo.”

 

“I’m refusin’ to entertain the notion that you know what your brother _smells_ like.”

 

“A man came here today.”

 

“What? What kind of vehicle was he driving? Did he attack you?”

 

“He stole vegetables from the garden. I watched him. Then he drove back to Aoyama.” The hallway where Genji had been sitting offered a view off the mountaintop, towards the ruins. “I know what house he went to.” McCree sighed.

 

“I’m not helping you get vengeance for some tomatoes.”

 

“Too late.” Genji held up his hand. His fingertips were dark. “When you did not arrive in a timely fashion, I went myself.” McCree grabbed the upheld fingers. The ends were caked with soil. “I replanted his other flowers and locked a dog in his yard that wasn’t his. Now he knows better than to steal from ghosts.”

 

“Probably trying to get more food for his family. Even in Hanamura everyone is getting lean, it’s all about canned soup you can’t cook…”

 

“Wow, how awful.” Genji’s visor flickered. McCree narrowed his eyes, stroking the dark triangle under his lip before he grabbed the sides of the faceplate and released it. Genji’s fingers came up to his wrists but did not stop him, and the Shimada immediately appeared humbler without the plate. Slim black eyebrows twitched up, wounded puppy, but Genji’s focus stayed on the stolen mask as McCree nestled it under his arm.

 

“Power’s back on.” McCree pulled out a strand of ink trapped in Genji’s helmet frame, leading it to tickle a scarred cheek till one gray eye shut. “Get cleaned up. We’re going out.”

 

“There’s a mission?”

 

“There is, but that’s not what we’re handling.”

 

McCree waited in the car. He pulled his hat over his face till he heard Genji open the passenger side door. Rips in Genji’s jeans exposed slivers of gray prosthesis. McCree made him go back inside for a jacket to go with his green t-shirt, he returned with the orange hoodie.

 

“You think we can find somewhere to eat at this hour?” Genji asked, stretching his legs along the ample floor space, hands in his front pockets. McCree stalled the issue as he touched the ignition and peeked over the dash, making a show of ensuring the headlights were on. He had not really thought of the time.

 

“Maybe somewhere to drink!” he laughed in recovery. He ticked his finger on the steering wheel thoughtfully as they coasted by Aoyama. Genji shrank closer to the center of the car as they passed the solar line debris, turning his shoulder up. McCree glanced at the cowering cyborg. He hung onto the wheel with one hand while he pulled the passenger seatbelt over and clicked the buckle together.

 

“You are not even wearing one,” Genji countered.

 

McCree looked down his chest. Shuffled another buckle into its clip with a grin.

 

“I was drinking a little before I got here.”

 

“I noticed.” Genji stayed on his side after they left Aoyama behind, and McCree went back to drumming his finger on the steering rim, like each bounce would generate a new idea. Genji’s face relaxed to stormy disinterest, eyes half-lidded. McCree had seen an identical look on Hanzo at late. He must have made a noise, or breathed out too wistfully, because Genji snapped out of torpor and locked on him. A sideways smirk got him out of answering the glare directly.

 

“The arcades are probably all open, kids got a reason to come out of their phones. Maybe we don’t go straight for the one by Shimada Castle but--”

 

“I don’t want to go to one of those places.”

 

“O-kay.” Twenty minutes out from Hanamura. One more bend of the mountain before their humble red traveler was caught in the light of the city. They passed a warehouse-looking box of a building, remarkable only for its position far from any house or other business. McCree tracked its dimly lit acreage from the corner of his eye, and noticed a sign made of electric tubing and styled like an ukiyo-e print on the far side. The subject was a rearing robotic stallion with a girl in partial samurai armor on his back.

 

McCree jammed the steering wheel to the right, hauling the SUV into the turnoff. Genji popped out of his huddle in response to centripetal pressure, his hands bracing on the dash and the cupholder. His eyes filled with the blue and pink light of the riding ronin-ette.

 

Genji scrambled out of the car. “ _O-kay_ ,” McCree repeated to himself, snagging his cigar box from the median console and rising from the driver’s side. The bouncer, a man around Genji’s height but a lot thicker, was waving at him frantically.

 

“We are open yeah! Power on!” the man shouted in throaty English. “You don’t have to take your business anywhere else!” Genji came around the side of the car and the bouncer’s enthusiasm faded. Genji dropped his hood, but the man still looked uncertain as the agents arrived together to the door.

 

The three of them stood on the pavement blinking at each other. Genji shoved McCree’s shoulder.

 

“I am showing this idiot around,” he exclaimed in Japanese to the bouncer. “You think he would know how to find this place otherwise?” McCree pushed his lower lip out, but when the bouncer looked at him raised his hand around a nonexistent glass.

 

“SAKE!” he cheered, pronunciation making the bouncer’s lip pull. “Sorry partner, my Japanese uh… _no habla._ ”

 

“The entry fee…” The bouncer was not sure who he should be addressing, but spoke in Japanese. McCree laughed before Genji could respond, noise big as Nebraska, and extracted his wallet. He keyed in the entry fee, doubled it, then tacked on ¥90,000 and displayed the keycard, his “Adam” ID sitting in the fold opposite the money. Genji leaned forward to peer at the ID details: birthdate, height, weight, current address…

 

“That about cover it?” McCree drawled, grabbing Genji’s shoulder and dragging him back. The bouncer licked his lips, scanned the card with his tablet.

 

“Welcome!” he bellowed in English, mussing his hair around a rising widow’s peak. “Sit anywhere you like. We are having a special VIP party soon, so please keep your laughter…small, yes?”

 

“I’ll do my best to be a gentleman, you have my solemn oath.” McCree flattened his hand against the back of Genji’s sweater and steered the cyborg through the door with him. Once they got under the electric hoops lighting the entry hallway, McCree stopped to pull out a cigar, stuffing it to the right corner of his mouth. He did not light it, waiting for Genji to pick a table. “Come to think of it, they should have given you an ID,” he chewed around the cigar tube.

 

“I was not supposed to leave the house aside from operations, or interact with anyone besides you.”

 

“Huh, musta fallen asleep during that part of the briefing,” McCree grunted. Genji started traveling the neon-sketched darkness. A bar in blue stretched along the wall to their left. A corridor of dark eggplant carpet between the barstools and the stage was littered with tables, each with its own golden underlights. The ukiyo-e theme continued on the spare walls, electronic light imitations of the Fisherman’s Wife and Suido Bridge making stations outside the women’s and men’s restrooms respectively. Aokigahara, complete with some ghosts peeking from the trees, rendered across the ceiling in intermittent waves of hologram dots.

 

McCree expected a table in front of the dyed blonde in white lingerie, but Genji took his watch before a dancer with glowing blue sparks layered through her hair, color-matching her glittering thong. Her heels lit up red as she stepped. A third dancer to their left had metal detailing on her spine that flowered into a string of butterfly tattoos between her shoulders. The one in front of them was all skin, no art.

 

A hostess came to take their drinks. Genji was already looking over the entertainment, so McCree ordered for them both, with a tip of his hat. When the bottles came, he popped Genji’s and leaned across the table to place it in front of the cyborg’s resting hands. He angled the base to brush into Genji’s fingers. “Wouldn’t want you to miss this affirming life experience,” he teased.

 

“Miss it?” Genji’s eyes flicked at him as he took a swig out of the bottle. “I have been coming to places like this since I was ten.” McCree choked on his beer.

 

“Bullshit.” He fanned his bottle at the stage. “I’m sure none of the ladies complained about some brat at the table either.” He really did not like the smile Genji put on.

 

“Not at the table. Father held meetings.” Genji pointed up. McCree gazed into the holographic ceiling a while before he realized Genji meant a second floor. “Brother and I were to observe, so we had to pass through this part.”

 

“Oh, alright,” McCree grumbled, though something about Genji’s story itched in his brain. More beer helped. Sniffling, he took another look around the establishment and noticed a gilded door on the same wall as the restrooms, set closer to the bar. When he watched for long enough, the door opened and a hostess stepped down from a set of stairs.

 

He rolled his eyes back to the blue dancer, but did not miss Genji’s quarter-depleted bottle in passing. “You good?” Genji pushed the bottle into his hand.

 

“I bet I could drive,” he volunteered.

 

“I bet you could, but you’re not going to.” It was nice to feel rather than see the deflation on his periphery while the dancer’s ass swung in front of him. “You cause a lot of trouble for your father?”

 

“No!” Genji’s synthesizer rattled with insult. “If I did not want to go I would just skip out beforehand.” Hard fingers crept over McCree’s, and stole the bottle back. Genji hoarded it to his chest. “And I only snuck downstairs sometimes. Father believed in forgiveness. His loss, I guess.” He drank. McCree watched the greedy bob of his black throat.

 

“Forgiveness, huh?” He thought of the last execution he had stood idly by for at Shimada Castle. The victim had been chained to a makeshift metal cross, and Hanzo lined up a mechanical arrow with a dividing tip, his tired eyes momentarily spurred. He fired at the foot of the cross. Six arrowheads bloomed through the victim’s back, and the entire silver and blue massacre was thrown in a river, where it made its way onto the news as intended. Genji had already been on-site a couple days at that point, but Genji did not read the news.

 

He ordered another beer since Genji was holding his hostage, leaning on the table and flipping his hat way up on his head as he addressed the hostess. She giggled.

 

“You are such a fake,” Genji groused. McCree pouted at him, but the cyborg fixed himself steadfastly at the blue dancer like he was studying for a test.

 

“It don’t cost nothin’ to be charming,” he offered, affecting his accent several notches beyond necessity. “But it costs too much to forgive~” The beer had him thinking of song lyrics, though he did not know a precise tune with those words, or in the notes he sang it. Just a theme or a mood, ringing up in his throat like jazz. Genji flinched away from the noise, ducking his head. The dancer in front of them toyed with her navy panties, edging them down and back up, tan lines weaving in like cobwebs over her hips.

 

Genji got out of his chair. McCree seized his arm. “Where ya goin’?”

 

“Bathroom.” McCree’s fingers eased up for a second, then tightened and pulled Genji closer. Genji's eyes looked wet.

 

“You have to use the toilet?” he wondered, probably too loudly because Genji was doing everything not to look at him.

 

“No.”

 

McCree’s face wrinkled up, thinking he misheard or was missing understanding or he had been in Japan too long and forgotten how to speak English. Genji slipped his arm loose gently. McCree gazed after and sure enough, the cyborg entered the bathroom. The cowboy huddled down over his beer, blinking.

 

The dancer’s shadow in the bottle was more alluring than the flesh on its face, distorting tall and short, gaining and dislodging blurry limbs. McCree noticed his own face under the reflection of the stage-- an unlit cigar bouncing at the right corner of his mouth. He picked out the cig to make sure it was real, and upon seeing the fine brown paper balanced between his fingers, decided he could go a little slower on the booze. New rule would be if Genji takes a sip, me too.

 

The hostess tempted him with another bottle though, and it was better company than the absent Genji, who had abandoned his post by six minutes now. McCree debated the artistic merits of watching a stripper in a beer bottle till a mass of light behind him capsized her reflection. Even worse, she stopped gyrating and bent at her waist, bowing her breasts into pierced pendulums while guitars kept on crying from the stage speakers. The other dancers made the same gesture, though the waitresses continued bustling amongst the tables. Not his hostess though; she was up by the entrance, welcoming in a flock of black suits.

 

Oh shit.

 

 _The power was on._ What was left of business needed to resume. Neutral territory outside the village worked for both parties. Six penguin tuxes moved out along the tables, and when one of the sleek, straight-cut men reached McCree’s glass nest he stopped with a click of his dress heels, grinning.

 

“Hey Adam.”

 

“Howdy!”

 

_Fuck._

 

“’Any port in the storm’, right?” The bodyguard tried out his English.

 

“You got it.”

 

Another of the penguins whistled, and the guard chatting him up slipped away with a salute. McCree glanced at the bathroom door, calculating the least garish route for a pair of clinking spurs--

 

Too slow. In the door swept the old man himself, long black hair, a suit with a navy tie, more bodyguards phalanxed around him. Blue under his eyes, like the lack of noise and light had kept him from sleeping. Hanzo ignored the patrons and bowing dancers entirely, walking in silence to the staircase door another hostess held open for him. He and most of his entourage faded up the golden stairs to the second floor.

 

Three guards remained on the public level: one outside the door to the stairs, one by the entrance, another roaming the floor. McCree turned back to his drinks, pop-eyed but unable to absorb a single detail of the girl that started moseying around in front of him again. Some insane part of his mind made a note to yell at the Shimada bodyguards later for not checking the bathrooms.

 

Genji tried to sit in the chair next to him, but McCree clamped on his arm. “Let’s go.” He doled a payment hologram from his keycard onto the table.

 

“What the hell?” Genji hissed in Japanese. Pink rested around his eyes just like blue did around Hanzo’s.

 

“Come on darlin’ giddy-up.” McCree grabbed up higher, getting his bicep across Genji’s shoulders, which trembled under the weight of him.

 

“Adam.” Genji struggled with the moniker like a mouthful of cough syrup. Strained eyes parsed McCree's face under the hat, eyebrows digging uncertainly. “Do you want to…?” He touched McCree's side, under the jacket.

 

“Sure.” His brain went over the conversation again, slow on the uptake but not drunk stupid-- needed just a little more percolation for that. What the hell kind of timing was this, Genji? The dragon question was not this important. “...yeah.”

 

McCree’s spurs rang out every step of their departure. He kept Genji flattened to his side, stumbling to keep up. The guard by the entrance did not pay nearly as much attention to safety orange as he did to McCree’s hat. They got out. “In the car, hurry,” he urged Genji, the tag in his pocket unlocking the SUV as they neared. McCree hopped into the driver’s seat, counting the motorcycles lining up at the front of the lot in their wake. He had parked next to the outer fence, so at best a single parking lamp and the occasional motorcycle headlight shined through the back window.

 

He licked his lips, watching the four men who replaced the bouncer at the establishment door. He got one hand over the wheel and reached for the ignition, but his finger met heavy sweater fabric. McCree turned and Genji’s segmented hands caught his cheeks. Scar-flecked lips nailed his at a diagonal, climbing from there to his lower eyelid. Genji's arms were shaking.

 

 _You didn’t even buy me any of those drinks, partner._ Genji got a leg over the cupholders, propping elbows on McCree’s chest to come down on him from above. He struggled to position his knees to either side of McCree’s natural country mouse spread. McCree reached around and tagged the ignition correctly this time. Genji’s face lifted away from his.

 

“You can’t drive--” McCree grabbed Genji’s back as it strayed dangerously close to the car horn, reeled the SUV around in reverse, and gunned for the access road. Genji’s chest clocked against his and Genji put his arms around the back of the driver's seat, looking over his shoulder through the windshield. McCree ducked his head to the other side of the orange hoodie and checked the rearview, but there were no headlights pursuing. The only reflections were his wild, red-tinged eyes.

 

Genji locked his fingers around the seat cushion, flattening his body over McCree, restraining him to the driver’s chair. McCree nudged his chin over Genji’s shoulder so he could see the road. Genji would not die if the car crashed and he was flung out the windshield, but non-Soldier, non-cyborg Jesse McCree might. It took him a while to realize the cyborg was playing seatbelt. It took even longer for him to figure out the scattered pulse next to his head was Genji’s heartbeat.

 

He veered off the road. “Jesse!” Genji took a hand off the back of the seat and grabbed for the steering wheel. McCree tapped his brake and Genji tumbled backward, shoulders thumping into the steering column.

 

The SUV droned its oversized horn and the cyborg jumped straight, all hands at McCree and the seat, trying to climb up both like a drowning animal.

 

“That’s what I was afraid of,” McCree observed pleasantly as he clicked off the headlights and tucked his arm around Genji’s raised hips. “Hey.” Genji looked down at him, and McCree steadied his scarred cheek with the heel of his palm. He leaned and caught the lips of panic, and Genji yelped against his mouth but did not open.

 

McCree extended his fingers into the roots of black hair, growled “C’mon” against the barrier, and “good boy” when Genji parted his lips.

 

What was trust? Genji would do just about anything he was told to. Everything felt normal: teeth, the soft insides of cheeks, the warm muscle he pushed down when it rose to meet him. Genji dropped into his lap, tears speckling his eyelashes. “Gonna scold me?” McCree asked when he let Genji go-- let himself go, to be honest. He needed to breathe, Genji was not even panting. “From your file I woulda said this was just your kind of danger.”

 

Genji was what the organization called _leveraged_. The opportunity was golden. Why’d he have to drink so much? Genji rested his hand on the wing of McCree’s collarbone, sitting up and looking out the windows. McCree plugged his phone into the car speakers. He was not sure about it, but he went with the jazz, soft as it could be, white noise.

 

He had parked the SUV in a moldy field under a billboard. It was an odd place for an advertisement, McCree thought. He often felt like the only man on the concrete around Hanamura. But just then a thin whistle piped over the digital saxophones and an icy light unfolded to the right of the back window. The bullet train came whispering by the billboard. Had he driven over the hovertracks to get in? Whoops. He flexed his elbows out, prepared to corral a frightened Shimada again, but Genji only watched the train pass, his expression serene under the flashes of aquamarine neon.

 

“I don’t know why the parking lot did not suit you,” Genji said. The billboard over their heads changed ads and palette. When they arrived it had been _Himi House Drone A200_ , a pastel purple automaton with a painted smiling face and a vacuum attachment on its arm. Now it read _HAYABUSA_ on a magenta fill, no images. In a minute it would claim _Mondatta speaks! Free to all, human and omnic encouraged, Tokyo Chiroplex,_ but the date would be from nearly two weeks ago.

 

“I’m shy.” McCree grinned lopsided reassurance. “You think someone knocking on the window would be good for your nerves? Maybe this’ll relax you some.”

 

“Do you view this as part of your job?”

 

Trust was being honest when it was advantageous.

 

“Everything in my life is part of my job.” McCree still smiled, but the look faded as he hugged Genji, tucking his face to a soft orange shoulder.  

 

Genji inserted a line of mechanical fingertips down the side of McCree's throat, under the lip of his scarf. The pointer finger felt around, digging clumsily into his pulse, like Genji was not sure where it was. He heard Genji’s other hand clicking on the seat controls, bird feet on a metal roof. The back cushion fell out behind McCree.

 

He glanced over his shoulder. Genji licked his exposed cheek, found the point of the bone and sucked on it. McCree winced, lifting his face. Genji tucked under his raised jaw and mouthed his neck, scars prickling over his throat like silk. Who kissed anything but the important parts, Jesse wondered. The three or four cardinal directions? There was nothing vulnerable there. Just feints at the real desire, prolonging the time before it was over with. Genji refused to come at him any route but crosswise. Was it spite? But as the cyborg's tongue flicked at his jugular, the tension holding him up in place of the driver's chair melted. He heard his own voice, low and inarticulate, and Genji's lips flitted back over his mouth to dine on the sound. Sucking the breath from him, making his soul coil in his stomach, holding him now, fingers on his spine...

 

McCree wrestled Genji into his arms and flipped him onto his back against the fallen seat, exchanging their positions.

 

“I thought you might be afraid of me,” Genji sighed, closing his eyes, tears breaking down his cheek.

 

McCree dragged his tongue up the line of salt. “Jesse--” He pushed his pelvis between the thighs of Genji’s jeans and ground his crotch against the Shimada's ass. Sharp little breaths left Genji's chest, or maybe his synth, with every thrust, and some sounded higher than others. Promising. The billboard light only cleared a diagonal line up the contracting and tensing blue of McCree’s jacket tails, and the tremors of Genji’s spread, torn knees. When McCree stuck his tongue back down Genji’s throat, it was in the blackness of the car’s back row.

 

“I’m right here,” he insisted. Genji dangled orange arms bonelessly over his spine. “Don’t care if you pinch me.” The synthesizer choked as he dug his fingers into the backs of the junior agent's legs, demonstrating a pinch.

 

“I know. I just don’t want to hurt you.” Genji was breathless, but saying the right things. McCree lacked a boundless experience with this kind of work, but figured he would know the moment. He had gut instinct. “I don’t feel anything…” Genji mumbled.

 

“What do you mean?” McCree hummed as he guided his hand under the hem of the orange hoodie, lifting it clear of Genji’s head and off his gray arms. He tossed it over the back seat, onto the latest bloody tarp he had forgotten to wash. The action raised most of Genji’s t-shirt off his torso too; it was all the same reddish, skinless synth flesh underneath. If it had not been so dark, the cowboy's eyes might have picked out the seams. McCree stuck his hand under the twisted t-shirt and gripped a pectoral muscle. He was sure that he would pull his palm out later and find it burnt red. The heat of Genji’s body oscillated on the edge of tolerability. It had to be like fucking the noon sun.

 

Charm be damned, McCree fumbled down to his own cold jeans and undid his belt, pulling down his underwear to expose himself. Genji raised his head at the jangle of metal, and slipped his hand between McCree’s legs. His fingers bumped the head, and retreated when it twitched. “It ain't gonna bite ‘cha.”

 

“That is not what...” Genji’s hand came back, tracing the perimeter of the tip, grazing down the veins. He groaned mournfully, making odd little frames around the shaft but never quite grabbing onto it.

 

“Like it?” McCree puffed. With his breath, and the tip of his nose, he tickled Genji’s face to one side. Came at him crosswise. “Imagine what it’s gonna feel like inside you,” he cooed into a naked ear, and blotted his tongue into the shell of it. Genji gasped, and McCree dug his boots on the rubber mat over the SUV floor, fighting to get more of his body on top of the cyborg’s steamy flesh. He secured his arm under Genji’s lower back.

 

“I remember your voice.”

 

McCree’s hand froze on the corner of Genji's jeans.

 

“Huh?”

 

“Your voice. You talked like that…” Genji shook his head, distress barely perceptible in the dark. “After Brother.”

 

“Oh.” Some of the color dripped out of McCree’s cheeks. Not that Genji could see. To Genji, McCree was only a looming black shadow. McCree slowly stringed a few likely words together. “Yeah…sorry.”

 

“You were saving my life.” Genji laid his fingers over McCree's and helped him free the denim from his hip.

 

“Nah, for what I said.”

 

“I don’t remember.” Thank God, thought Jesse McCree. “Just the way you sound…”

 

“You trust me then?”

 

“Yes.”

 

The moment had arrived. McCree ran over the inquiry in his head, tweaking the delivery as he went along: _I don’t want that to happen again darlin’. Do you know anything about the dragons? Anything that can help us?_ He could sign the post to Gabe, and they could kill Hanzo but presumably that was secondary to obtaining the tech. McCree opened his mouth, but the question sounded strange coming out of it:

 

“ _You shouldn’t._ ”

 

His stomach tightened into a knot of spirits and saltwater.

 

His knees weakened, body going limp over Genji.

 

He reared to life, breaking the worried reins of Genji’s arms, and wormed through the driver’s door. He stumbled into the field, crawled at first, then staggered to his feet, hands on his knees. He bowed his head to the outskirts of Hanamura.

 

Genji took his hat off before it fell in the dirt.

 

Amateur Jesse got his sick out on the roadside again, a cyborg’s warm prosthetic hand resting on his back.

 

* * *

 

McCree awoke with his spine barking disarray, seatbelt all that prevented him from slumping against the dash. A cautious upward tip of his hat scored him with daylight, but the SUV was sheltered under a tree with long, weeping branches that protected him from most of it. He was in the passenger seat. He expected sour on his tongue, but he was cool. An empty water bottle rested under one of his boots. He examined his hands: no burns, not even red.

 

When he got out he had to step around a couple of broken spirit shrines, mass-produced type, both the same shape and height. One was almost intact but had a flowering yellow weed rooted inside it. Raising his head, he realized the car was parked just a little ways down from the amber landing pad of the mountain estate. He scooped up the shrine with the flower, soil and stone heavy in his palms.

 

He carried it to the outer walkway, where Genji had unlocked a couple shutters so he could sit on the edge with his feet on the ground. The cyborg was glass-eyed, naked to the waist so far as ropes of prosthetic muscle could be considered nudity. A green rod from the aid kit rested next to his relaxed hand. McCree set the shrine beside Genji’s feet. Genji looked at the offering, then up at him.

 

“Brother is the one who believes in omens and auspicious days.” Genji rubbed the dew from his eyes.

 

“I can take you scouting for the mission tonight.”

 

“I already did it.” Genji eyed McCree’s confusion. “You told me the address and I went. Then I came back here. Your car has a ‘home’ auto-setting, but you have always been careful not to bring me to your apartment.”

 

“That’s…mighty fine of ya.” McCree tried to tip his hat, became perplexed at the shape under his fingers, and pulled the front rim around straight with a blush. “What do you want from me then?”

 

“You can see me when Hanzo is ready.”

 

“I should really come by once you submit the mission report. It’s your uncles, don’tcha think--”

 

“They are in my path.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : I've got a bullet with your name on it.
>   * _Aokigahara_ : the Sea of Trees, a dense forest northwest of Mt. Fuji associated with ghosts of the dead
>   * _City of Rocks_ : a formation of pillar-like rocks in New Mexico created by a volcanic eruption ~35 million years ago
>   * At this very moment, ¥90,000 is equivalent to US$800 :P
>   * _Fisherman's Wife_ : "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife", a famous erotica print of a woman having sex with octopuses
>   * _Suido Bridge_ : "Suido Bridge and the Surugadai Quarter", print of a koinobori (Children's Day flag shaped like a carp), part of the collection _One Hundred Famous Views of Edo_
>   * #inappropriateusesofscatterarrow
> 



	5. The Third Demon

 

Under the full moon bobbed a red and silver romance between man and genetically reorganized tobacco leaf. From its scorched tip to the blue smoke McCree puffed out of his nose, the cigar looked the part of nasty, fat, fiery, and cancerous, and wore the ghostly hat of several centuries’ black lungs. But like how alcoholics never died of cirrhosis anymore, the effects did not stick to the modern cowboy. The fire he tasted never left his tongue, the nanomechanical smoke was even more immaterial than its color suggested. _You are such a fake._

 

No babies caroling outside his apartment tonight. Pink blossoms drifted down from Shimada Castle, and the tree at the end of the street was crying terribly too, a river of petals over the concrete. He wondered who Hanzo hired to sweep the estate grounds. He had never seen any cherry fallout in the rock gardens, or at the renovation of the family shrine completed just in time for Golden Week.

 

Two dragons spun around each other, mad as hell, and in love. McCree never hoped to understand the Shimada crest, but Hanzo had to go and highlight the scroll where he had split Genji open too, moving it to prominence below the new shrine mural. Genji’s bloodstains were still soaked in, bright as the day they were carved. None of the scant few cousins and distant relations left liked it, but they also feared becoming arrow art. Hanzo and Genji’s uncles would have protested upon seeing the completed piece, had they not been recently murdered.

 

Soon Hanzo would be dead too, and that would be the end of the conundrum. Dragons would be gift shop tack once more. McCree kicked cherry blossoms off his garden beds and used the watering can to stock his tomatoes for the unattended days ahead. Like the vegetables at the mountain estate, they grew year-round and were marketed as “Evergreens”, complete with a genetically dyed green peel. He stole a couple ripe ones and bagged them when he got into the kitchen, sketching out in his head how he would approach Genji Shimada, but making no special consideration of what he could serve whole tomatoes with.

 

He dug his body armor out from under the closet floorboards and shoved it in a black plastic garbage bag, dust layer and all. It went in the SUV trunk. He put on his gloves to massage his Peacekeeper with a nanofiber cloth, and bagged it in a silver ziplock. It went under the driver’s seat.

 

The black datapad was locked in the glove compartment. Tomatoes were the first item in his publicly viewable travel bag. Then toiletries, the brush he used to keep his hair back nice and pretty for the Shimada boys. Traceless yen, what they used to call _hard cash_. A suit and a change of clothes. Work phone with a brown leather case. Adam’s wallet. McCree stood in front of his medicine cupboard evaluating a half-empty bottle of sparkly blue lube. He threw it in the trash and packed a new one. The condom box was okay gently used, individual packages crinkling around inside. Shampoo, conditioner. At least he was clean on the outside.

 

He got out past Aoyama and parked at the estate with the horizon still full of sunset blood, the man in the moon a toothy spotlight above. McCree probed the leaves of garden: dry, unattended. No one in the house. The deed was still fixed under the welcome sign.

 

McCree perused the outer halls for a location where the storm shutters had been carelessly left open: back of the house, facing the mountaintop. He headed into the woods. There were no tracks to follow, just gut feelings. He heard water, in the _plip-plop_ sense rather than the cleansing flow of a river. Headed that way, and rubbed the bridge of his nose as a whip of humidity broke over his face. The treeline breached into a steam-covered clearing: the monkey pool, still no monkeys in it. He breathed out slow, as if that would let him hear the ninja, or give his eyes a target.

 

“You think you’re good or somethin’?” He turned around and Genji stood there, black feet positioned in the spaces between fallen leaves, visor glaring in surprise. Genji relaxed his heels to the ground. He searched around his slender body, and the branches above. “Don’t worry on it,” McCree laughed. “It was nothin’ but instinct.” The visor veered back his way. “Good evening to ya, by the by.” McCree tipped his hat. Genji’s shoulders bunched, his thighs drawing together.

 

“Where?”

 

McCree did not immediately calculate the meaning of the question, which spat out from the blade-keel helmet like a command.

 

But, of course. The mission.

 

“Not tomorrow.” Because time was a place. “The day after. The whole castle is still locked down for the holiday till then.” Genji, the cyberized ninja killer, wilted and shuffled his feet among the leaves. “Ideally in his bedroom though, while he’s sleeping. I take it you don’t need a roundabout of your own birthplace, but there should be one new blueprint on the ops server anyway. Hanzo renovated the shrine.” Genji’s head snapped up like it had been pegged by an arrow.

 

“What did he change?”

 

Careful, McCree. These were not twin spirits, aside from their rage.

 

“I guess the biggest thing is he hired someone to do a giant painting of the crest. Sort of a modern-looking style, though I sure ain’t an expert.”

 

“Wakamatsu then.”

 

“I believe you’re correct. How’d you know that?” McCree was smiling around the dark drop in his gut.

 

“A couple years after I was born, they moved me to a new room. Father ordered Hanzo to pick an artist to do the paintings. Father told him he could not choose anyone that would bring dishonor to the family-- to keep him from insulting me.”

 

“As brothers do,” McCree guessed. He had no first-hand experience. _La familia_ went parents to children, and siblings were only there to kill each other.

 

“Father told me Hanzo took a very long time. He tested what stuffed animals I liked best, what places I fussed less at on day trips. Then he picked the woman who could paint those things. He is lazy and has never gone with anyone different since.”

 

“That does sound like his approach.” McCree could see kid Hanzo hunched over a tally board, scoring _2_ for Pachimari and _0_ for teddy bear. Simple! “And then your dad had a story to tell you later about it.” Respect to Shimada Senior for trying to manage a couple dragon sons.

 

“I am unsure now if Father’s stories were all lies. He was a fool.” Unfortunately, dragons could not be sated.

 

“You would know better than me,” was all McCree could sigh out. Genji approached him, the slanted plate of his helmet tipping at his neck. McCree held up his hands, mouth pulling to one side. Genji sniffed, visor dimming, and backed off. McCree remained mannequin-esque, palms raised, till his brain registered. “I’m not drunk,” he protested.

 

“You can go now.” He did not know where Genji was walking off to through the trees and the venomous purple intersection of sun and moonlight. He did not know if _Genji_ knew.

 

“That’s not happening.”

 

The ninja stopped. He considered McCree over his shoulder. McCree noted that for all his posturing about the importance of his work, Genji did not have his swords.

 

“You are wearing your work clothes,” Genji said.

 

McCree looked down. Genji appreciated the distinction between the penguin suit he wore for Hanzo and his _work clothes_ , lined gray and black shirt, dark pants, colorless chaps, metal boots. Blackwatch. Genji tipped one finger at McCree’s descriptive belt buckle. “Is that supposed to be just for your dick?”

 

“You would know better if you had ever seen me in action.”

 

“I have.”

 

“Don’t be like that.” McCree might have been angrier if he had not spent a few weeks thinking long and hard about all the ways he deserved Genji’s scorn. How, when the mission ended, he would not be welcomed at headquarters either. Nearly four years since the Shimada bled out in his hands, and Overwatch was no closer to understanding the family’s secrets.

 

“You don’t trust me.”

 

“It’s HQ that doesn’t. And that’s fair. You’re new. It’s still your first campaign.” _And yer significantly further out of your mind than anybody else in the organization_ , some squirrely, nasty Deadlock sticking in his heart wanted him to say. “You ain’t curious as to why it took them so long to approve the final mission?”

 

If the way Genji tensed and searched the dirt at his feet did not answer the question McCree had yet to ask, nothing would. Genji frequently forgot that hiding his face did not mean his body language was likewise ghostly.

 

“Because they are afraid of him like everyone else,” the cyborg sputtered. McCree chuckled.

 

“Let’s go to the house. I know you don’t care about the wind, but I die of exposure pretty quick. Even if it is gettin’ to be nice this time of year.” He leaned his shoulders back, surveying the bushy trees and the white-cheeked birds darting between them in the fading light. Genji followed his lead, green eyeframe panning across the isolated, misty wilderness.

 

“I don’t feel good,” he moaned at the idyllic scenery. McCree hooked his thumbs against his belt.

 

“I get that,” he soothed wistfully. “That’s why I’m here. Now move.”

 

He and Genji took their own meandering paths, but ended up at the same place. He made Genji replace the storm shutters, then took him out front to water the garden. Told the ninja to wait in the kitchen, and unpacked his travel bag in the bedroom. The futons had been washed and aired and returned to the closet, which was something at least. Come to think of it, he had never seen Genji’s room at the Castle, unless it had been repurposed. He imagined a four poster bed at minimum. He wondered what kinds of paintings Hanzo had chosen for the room, and if Genji had torn them down to make space for videogame posters.

 

McCree pulled out his tomatoes, pushing his lips together at them a while before he decided to see what was available in the pantry. He could grill them. Could they count as fried if he did not have cornmeal?

 

Genji sat on a stool with his arms crossed over the pink prep island countertop. Routine, except it was the wrong time of day. “You wanna discuss it now or wait till we get back to HQ?” McCree asked as he kneaded seeds from tomato slices and drizzled the affair with olive oil. Genji drew the chin of his helmet deeper behind his interlaced arms.

 

“I do not know what you are talking about.”

 

McCree smiled. He pulled his Shimada-issue phone from his back pocket and opened the gallery app, sliding it across the table to Genji. The first open image was one of Genji’s uncles, limbs stretched to tearing and bent around his torso like some wildly exaggerated fetal cower. Skin had been flayed from his arms and legs in many small cuts, but also from his face, just a red skull tucked behind his shattered arms. Lightning-like scars branched out of the larger wounds. Genji switched the screen to the next image, though McCree noticed he did not use his fingers to do so. The gallery panned from photo to photo in front of the green visor, demonstrating more victims in a similar condition.

 

“We were sent to investigate the country house and determine what kind of attack it was, so we could guard Hanzo from it.” McCree turned around to oil up the grill plate, and popped the tomatoes into the home unit. “Now, you reported all objectives complete to the ops server.”

 

“Clearly, they are.”

 

“You had two targets.” McCree washed his hands. “You telling me you also killed four of your cousins and your great-uncle for the hell of it? I’m not sure that’s organization policy darlin’.”

 

“I got carried away.”

 

He walked around to Genji’s side of the counter and bent over next to him, thumbing through the photos till he got to a close shot of the great-uncle’s chest. It was a 30-centimeter hole, punched perfect as a donut’s, strings of lung and chunks of bone hanging out in the halo.

 

“How’d you do that with a sword?”

 

“Would you like to find out?” Genji hissed.

 

“Well, it would be easier if you were honest with me.” The timer beeped. McCree laid the phone back down on the countertop and went to retrieve his tomatoes. He scooped the slices onto a plate with a maneki-neko print in the middle and a ring of flowers on the outer edge. After closing the grill he sprinkled some basil over his preparation, leaves deforming as they made contact with the heat and moisture. He laid the plate out on the counter and started searching for utensils.

 

Genji reached over the bloody phone pictures for one of the slices, and McCree caught his hand, thrusting it back at him. Genji’s shoulders molded tense, angry points and his visor lifted from his arms. He rested a greedy hand to either side of the tomato plate.

 

“This is the most pathetic looking chili,” he scolded.

 

“The guy on the phone? Yeah.” McCree dragged away the mechanical fingers again. “They’re hot,” he advised, then tipped his chin at the phone. Genji withdrew his arms from the table. McCree sat down with a couple forks, watching the pulp of various photos reflect off Genji’s faceplate.

 

“I don’t know...” Genji sat back from the phone, helmet listing toward the kitchen window.

 

“Did you kill them or not?”

 

“I don’t think I did.”

 

McCree sighed. “I think I found them like that.” Genji's head bobbed at him like a bird, insistent. “But maybe I was just confused again.”

 

“I don’t think you’re quite that far gone, Mr. Shimada.” Genji shuddered. McCree snickered through straight white teeth. He dumped the forks on the plate’s outer edge and leaned over to tap around the phone gallery. “You think this was another clan? Yanai, maybe? Look at this one, seems he went through a goddamn woodchipper of vengeance.”

 

“I don’t know,” Genji floated more purposefully. McCree regarded him with half-lidded eyes, but there was no expression to decipher on the visor. He had gotten pretty good at translating head tilts and eyeframe pulses, but he had his limits.

 

“Well, that’s too bad. I hope this chainsaw maniac or whatever he is doesn’t beat you to Hanzo.” He cleared the gallery and locked the phone. “More importantly, you gotta not lie on your mission reports.”

 

“I apologize.”

 

“Avoidin' lies in general is my advice. Did you notice your youngest cousins were locked in the basement? Just the three of 'em left now, so far as immediate heirs are concerned. They’re all about the same age, bet they’re gonna have a great big row once you kill Hanzo. Seems like someone is using the Aoyama tactic.” Genji shifted his head, like a nod, but utterly noncommittal. “Genji.” The cyborg dutifully focused on him. “If you know something, you need to tell me.”

 

“I don’t know why he would do that,” Genji muttered.

 

“Who?” McCree waited. Nothing more came. “Alright.” Genji’s visor blinked erratically. “It’s okay,” he clarified, stabbing a tomato and holding the fork handle out to the Shimada. Genji relieved it from him subdued pick of his fingers. “Just so you know, I can’t support you right if you don’t tell me everything that’s going on.”

 

“I do not need to be protected.” Genji keyed off his faceplate. He held the tomato slice under his lips, but did not bite. “You want to know about the dragons.”

 

“Yeah…?” McCree drawled, hungry mouth paused over his own slice, brown eyes ticking from wrinkled basil to Genji.

 

“Only Hanzo has one.” Genji chomped down on green flesh. McCree kept staring at him. His tomato wilted off his fork.

 

“You serious?”

 

“Yes.” Genji ate, ignoring McCree as the cowboy started laughing and whooping. “This is good,” he murmured, swallowing another smoky wedge.

 

“Well it’s a tomato, it’s hard to screw up,” McCree groaned. “You want seconds? Oh, right…” And the laughter started again, even higher pitched. Genji took his fork to the sink.

 

McCree painfully came around to eating his own cooling vegetable. “It is good,” he whimpered. Genji returned to service the empty plate, water from the faucet running like white noise jazz behind McCree.

 

He got up and over to the sink, clapping his hands onto the nickel edge of the basin. Genji looked up, visor already back on his face. He took McCree’s fork to wash it. “So, if he has a dragon and you don’t, how are you planning to win?”

 

“It does not make him invincible. You said he has been distracted.” Genji set the emptied plate and utensils on the drying rack and toweled off his hands. “I do not care if I die, so long as he is with me.”

 

McCree tapped the back of Genji’s helmet, fingers slithering under one of the white spokes jutting from the top. The material had to be very light despite its durability, it echoed under his fingertips like there was nothing inside.

 

“You don’t, huh?” Genji had nothing to do at the sink now and stood still under McCree’s petting hand, arms at his sides. McCree ran his thumb in a circle over the gray cranium. “You know somethin’ about people who really don’t care if they die, they don’t usually tell anyone that. Comes off like a cry for help.” Genji remained silent. McCree leaned his head to one side, untied hair draping down his grinning jaw. “The way you talk, it sounds like you miss him.”

 

“Then my English is not as good as I thought,” Genji snapped. “Is there some other information you want?”

 

“Don’t worry.” McCree dropped his hand away. “Seems I’ve already failed my mission. The organization will lose their minds at me, but that’s nothing new.” Genji peeked up.

 

“Why do you never use the name?”

 

“Habit,” he answered. He mussed the back of his hair. “It’s classy ain’t it? I’ve always worked for an organization, but my boss changed. That’s all.”

 

Genji's fingers diagrammed fists. “You feelin’ better now?” McCree prompted, and the cyborg cocked his head. “You said you didn’t feel good earlier.”

 

“Showing me pictures of my dead family always cheers me up.”

 

“You must be alright.”

 

Night wind drummed across the roof. Pearly light began ducking through the window. Genji rested a hand on McCree's hip as he squeezed between cowboy and countertop to hit the kitchen lamp switches. He returned the same way so he could peer out the window into the moonlit forest. “Genji," McCree purred. "Would you be opposed to--”

 

“No.”

 

“Would you be opposed to lettin’ me assist you with Hanzo?”

 

Genji breathed a mite faster by McCree's estimate, only to pivot smartly and bow.

 

“Thank you for dinner. I would like to show you something.”

 

“Hey, thanks for cleaning up~” McCree replied automatically with a flick of a finger-gun, only to watch Genji walk out the door. He looked down the barrel of his homemade weapon, frown unsettled between his cheeks. Was he being ghosted?

 

He followed Genji, a clanking drum behind the Shimada’s reticent steps. Genji pried open the oni on the bedroom wall. McCree snorted: at least he did not bore holes in the tatami mats. “Should’ve taught you how to fix ‘em,” he mourned as he pulled his legs out of his combat boots, kicking the metallic footwear under the feather painting. Genji appraised his plain black socks as he stepped around the most egregious tatami gaps and pulled aside one mat that was split in half. “Gotta take care of your house.”

 

Genji sat down on the pillow of the futon McCree had fetched out of the closet earlier. He ticked the backs of his heels on the covers. “Wait! I’ve got it.” McCree flashed out of the room and jogged-- slid on the corners --to the atrium in his socks. He retrieved the fuzzy pink guest slippers that had not suited him, eyed the perpetual deed on the wall, and grabbed it as well. When he returned Genji was holding up the corner of a tatami mat beside the futon, inspecting the eroded straw. He dropped it, but McCree threw down the deed holofilm on top. While Genji twisted to inspect the writing for the first time, McCree knelt down at the futon’s other end and fit one of the slippers over the cyborg’s foot.

 

He got its twin on before Genji deigned to look over. The Shimada tipped his new fluffy feet towards and away from each other. “You’re a perfect Cinderella,” McCree grinned, though his eyes softened as he reviewed from ankles to eyeframe. “Was hopin’ I would get you to start dressing in somethin’ other than that scrub suit on your own. But I think we made some progress?” Genji brushed the shoulder of his Overwatch kit the same way he had when McCree first proposed such radical ideas as dressing up and going out. “You are gettin’ forest on my bedsheets though.”

 

The visor light notched a few degrees dimmer. Genji reached his right hand to his left side, angling up his back, lifting his legs onto his knees, and turned around in front of McCree. He reached for the cuff at the back of his plated neck. “You don’t have to,” McCree murmured, thinking of his travel bag. Genji moved quick: thank you for dinner, and now here is my--

 

“Help me.” With a static snap Genji opened a naked vee down his shoulderblades, a triad of capped ports shining green along his spinal column. Overwatch orange straps sloughed gently from his arms like the drying wings of a moth.

 

“Yes, Mr. Shimada.” McCree failed to get a rise from his target this time. He dropped his hat off on top of the estate deed and leaned forward in the orange lamplight. Hands slipped down the sides of the parted uniform and gripped Genji's abdomen, and fingers fanned to shear the nanofiber away. "Yes, Genji," he continued, low and buttery soft. The matte finish torso rose and fell calmly beneath his fingertips, and he sank into the rib-like gaps in the sides only to graze a deeper, harder black material. The surface flesh had a few millimeters of give before it turned firm, like skin, only he was sure if he rubbed it too hard he would come out with an electrical charge. Still heated like in the car, just a whimsy from burning.

 

Genji freed his arms from the shoulder cuffs and the front of the uniform fell from his chest. He rotated his shoulders, sitting up to flex the plates composing his back. McCree flirted with the dark armor running to the tailbone of the exposed torso, before moving his hand over the neon circles of the upper back and pressing Genji down. He stuck his hands under the remaining fabric and dug his calluses into Genji's hips. “Hey, I’m not a ‘last man on Earth’ to you, am I?”

 

The cyborg's visor slowly turned and twinkled over a powerful shoulder at him.

 

“I am not sure how pretty the girls would find me now. Except Angela.” Did Genji actually lift his ass when he said her name? Really? McCree's cheeks blistered.

 

“Plenty of women at the organization used to scars _besides_ Mercy.” He fondled the outsides of Genji’s thighs under the cloth. “Lift your leg.” He pulled the bottom half of the orange and gray from Genji’s feet, navigating the folds off carefully so as not to disturb the slippers. He slammed his hand onto Genji's right cheek, dragging his hips back, lips snarling as the steady rise and fall of Genji’s chest hitched.

 

McCree slid four fingers forward under the muscle of Genji's rump, dragging his thumb down last, into the cleft.

 

He burrowed for a few seconds before a kind of dull alarm glassed his eyes. He lifted the cyborg’s back end with his hand, studying the anatomy, ravenous teeth fading into a child-like gap of surprise. “Turn over.” Genji obliged, fanning his legs out butterfly over the McCree’s hips. The cowboy daggered his fingers to his forehead and dearly missed his hat. “Omnics can have uh…” He swallowed, indexing his hands along the perimeter of the flat gray triangle between Genji’s legs. A few millimeters of give, then a firm foundation.

 

He looked at Genji’s chest, the pectoral muscle present but likewise unelaborate. The only thing he knew was less chaste than an action figure was Genji’s face, and Genji was wearing his helmet. The visor blinked at him.

 

“I don’t feel anything,” Genji explained.

 

McCree looked up and down the red-gray palette of artificial abdomen and legs, placing his hands on the insides of Genji’s spread thighs.

 

“You don’t feel that?” he rumbled.

 

“I know where you are restraining me.” McCree bit his lip. If he wasn’t careful, it was going to bleed. “If you exerted enough pressure to cause damage, maybe--”

 

“No.” But his hands clamped down and Genji started. The cyborg began to pull his limbs free, visor brightening. “Not mad at you,” McCree informed himself as much as Genji, easing his grip. He had a flash of the gray body in front of him ending in ragged ruby tatters, guts piled against his lap, an uneven hole punched through the center and side like an animal bite, Genji trying to scream something at him with his eyes.

 

He refocused on the steady green light of the visor. “Did Mercy tell you she couldn’t do anything about it? Because that’s a lie.” Genji bent his knees and sat up smooth as a work of art into McCree's lap.

 

“I told her not to. If I only exist to take revenge on Hanzo, I have to stay focused. He said I was weak because of distractions like that. It is part of why he killed me.” Genji had gone completely calm and McCree felt like he was having some kind of heart attack.

 

“You did this to make your _brother_ happy?!”

 

“I am only saying I understand now, and that I should have listened earlier.” Genji tipped forward and rested his faceplate on McCree’s chest. McCree clenched the bedsheets around him, and stared at the cycles of green light passing through the machine parts in the Shimada's back.

 

He grabbed Genji’s shoulder.

 

“What are you doing? Why show me this?"

 

"To make you leave me alone."

 

It took McCree one long inhale to puzzle Genji out. Genji was starting to shrink down in his lap like a flower nobody was watering.

 

"You mean so I will leave you alone to deal with Hanzo."

 

"I want you to understand that this," Genji gestured to himself. "Does not mean anything. This is not me. That way when the time comes, you will not interfere. You will allow my to complete my mission, and then you will leave this place and go back to wherever you came from. Geneva."

 

"New Mexico." McCree's lips ticked up in melancholy. "Don't I wish, darlin'. What about in the car? You makin' fun of me?" He clasped the back of Genji's helmet before the ninja could duck away, holding the visor up.

 

"That was just a mistake. I was confused. I should have told her to take away the endocrine too." Genji crossed his slippers toward each other behind McCree's back. "Um...I never found any lube in the car back then..." McCree thought about it.

 

"Entirely beside my point," he concluded in a roll of charming tenor. He dropped his hand from the helmet to Genji's lower back. "Here's the plan: I'll go with you and we'll kill Hanzo together." Genji's shoulders sagged.

 

"It is honorable to face Brother alone," he tried.

 

"Fuck honor." He had never seen Genji's visor brighter. "Let's murder the asshole and go home." McCree yanked the cyborg forward, stomach-to-stomach. "Then you go to Mercy and tell her to fix you up. We'll have leave due. I'll let you bunk with me to Numbani or somewhere fine like that, somewhere that doesn't look anything like this. I'll make you some real chili, and hand to God, out of nothin' but the goodness of my heart, I will help you test any upgrades."

 

Genji laughed, the painful kind. His dark hands pressed together on McCree's chest and he buried his helmet keel against them. McCree sighed, stretched his legs out and perused the room. He found Genji's swords: lying in a disorderly pile under the wall painted like a deep forest. Genji did not like anyone else to touch them, but he did not ever seem to take good care of them. "Hey Genji," he grunted. "Can you feel things on your face?" After a few seconds, a quiet "yes" rose from the intersection of mechanical artifacts and McCree's chest. "Take off your helmet. I'll see if I can make ya cum from kissing." Genji started laughing again. His synthesizer either could not translate happiness, or decided not to participate, so he just shook against McCree with plastic clicks of his armor on his fingers. "I'm not joking," McCree warned, and the shaking intensified. "I'll put in the hours."

 

He felt out the segue of plate to synth muscle on Genji's back and started driving his fingers as hard as he could into the striated cords. "It'll be fine. You're allowed to make mistakes." Genji pushed against his hand, wherever it went. "Hey," McCree called after a couple minutes. "Go turn off the light for me." He took off his clothes while Genji went out to operate the switches in the hall. The cyborg's visor hovered in the doorway, looking at him, then clicked off like any other bulb. McCree kicked his feet to a comfortable protrusion from the end of the covers (he was a little long for the mattress) and laid down on his side. A warm hand covered his shoulder. He startled, but Genji's arms foiled the movement, tucking around him. Corralled to Genji's chest like a little baby was one of the nicer ways he had ever fallen asleep, even if he did start sweating.

 

* * *

 

He woke and it was still pitch black. His wet hair pinned around his face. He spit a strand out of his mouth, and realized Genji was pulling on his cheek.

 

“Will the people at the organization yell at you?” the cyborg asked, dire tidings all around his synthesized voice.

 

“Gabe’ll have my ear for sure.” McCree closed his eyes again.

 

“Will they hurt you?”

 

“No,” he snuffled, lips making the torturous stretch to a smile. “I guess that's one big difference between this organization and the last. It’s a perk. Why would you ask that?” He yawned. Genji was touching the back of his neck, stroking under the base of his skull in his clumsy, unfeeling way. “Anybody there ever hurt you, Genji?” The exploration stopped. “Sparring, yeah, excuse for all the soldiers to be dicks to you. What about besides that? You can tell me.”

 

McCree tried his eyes again. Could not see a damn thing.

 

“Angela wouldn’t hurt me,” Genji choked out.

 

“She stick you with a needle or something? Medical put a ton in me before they let me come here, which didn’t seem fair 'cause they already did that when they brought me to HQ. Said I had things they ‘hadn’t seen in a quarter century’, like I was a goddamn dog…” He yawned again, the kind that sucked all the energy from his face with its force. “Is it Children’s Day yet?”

 

“It is oh three hundred.”

 

“Got you talking like them already? Now there’s a tragedy.” McCree thought he was falling asleep, but five minutes later he still had some idea where he was. “You okay?”

 

“Yes. The day itself is bound to be more important to Hanzo than it is to me.”

 

McCree rolled that around his brain a while, but came up empty.

 

“What happened, if you don’t mind my askin’? You try to run away?” He made a finger-gun and aimed it at a guess of Genji’s chest, landing right over his heartbeat. It was a reassuring sound, and he started to flatten his hand over it, but Genji took his wrist and guided him lower, to where the ribcage started to retreat from the sternum in people who had anatomy as simple as that.

 

“I tried to stay as I was. Let us hope Hanzo will be happy with this instead.”

 

* * *

 

A blurry oni glared at McCree over the gray hill of Genji’s shoulder. He blinked wetly till the white teeth sharpened, the bulbous red eyes focused, the ruby-lipped grin resolved across the fusuma. He started to yawn, catching himself as he noticed Genji’s head. The visor was still switched off, presumably for his benefit, but the cyborg’s face was relaxed on its side, tipped back a shade into carelessness. Genji’s arms were limp around him. McCree smiled.

 

“You fall asleep?”

 

It took a second, but the visor clicked on and leveled at him. A bubbly periphery of forest bird songs and sunlight trickled through the sliding walls. “Guess it must be nice to never have nightmares,” McCree proposed as he stretched his arms out of Genji's hold and collapsed them above his head, across the futon pillow.

 

“Do you have many?”

 

“Nah. Well, none I remember. That’s the key, ain't it?” He winked, gesture perhaps suffering from the early hour.

 

A sharp metal bird joined the chorus, raucous as a pocket alarm clock, and Genji’s head ticked up. McCree grabbed his shoulder. “It’s okay. Just my phone. They don’t let us assign personal ringtones.” He rolled over and grabbed the leatherbound rectangle from his piled trousers. “Well shit, it might not be okay,” he muttered, holding the phone between himself and Genji. Genji peered over the top edge of the screen at the characters specifying the current Shimada head of security. “I might be fired,” McCree whined. “I took off a double-shift to come over here. Wasn’t decent to leave you alone…” He put the phone under the covers and closed his eyes, determined.

 

Genji’s sharp fingers immediately dug the phone bud into the whorl of his ear.

 

“Ah! Christ! …yeah,” McCree groaned into the line. He kept his eyes shut, but listened, and his own voice eventually crackled out a reply. “What do you mean?” then “Any evidence?” His eyelids pressed together even harder, then relaxed open as he squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Dredge the two streams near the estate. And the koi pond, don’t forget the goddamn koi. …I don’t give a fuck if it’s disrespectful. We have an obligation to the Family to figure out what happened as soon as possible. Yeah. I’ll be there.” He ripped the earpiece out.

 

“Your Japanese is very good,” Genji murmured as McCree sat up. “I have never heard you speak it for so long before.”

 

“That was security. Your brother is missing. He might have been kidnapped.”

 

“Security asked you for advice?” Genji wondered, blasé to the bombshell.

 

McCree tapped two fingers against his brow, watching that catty green visor.

 

“Told you I would’ve been top guy if it weren’t for your traditions. I have the head’s trust-- well, unless this whole story is because my cover is blown, and they’re calling me in so the old man can shoot me. Just think Genji, we can die on the same damn day.” McCree winced onto his feet. Genji followed him to the bathroom.

 

“You are not taking me with you?”

 

McCree skipped the sitting stool, washcloth, and bucket in the tiled area and planted himself directly under a showerhead. He hissed at the little puff of cold water before the heater caught up, keeping the nozzle spray light since Genji was apparently going to stand around and have a conversation with him no matter what else he was doing.

 

“You’re the sword,” he said as he bunched his fingers into his dark brown hair, yanking out the tangles. “We don’t send you till we know where he is, and what his condition is. Sorry, it’s probably not going to be what we envisioned.” Genji handed him a bar of mint soap. “You Shimada.” McCree laughed unevenly. “Always messing up our operations with your own issues.”

 

“I am sorry I did not die by your hand that night like I was supposed to,” Genji answered. He was waiting with a towel when McCree finished.

 

As the cowboy tamed his hair into a red loop and shaved off the dreams of a beard, he glanced at his shadow in the mirror. “Any chance you can trust me enough to wait for me to get back?” he asked as he put on his Shimada bodyguard costume. “I can let you know how to proceed as soon as _I_ know. Just don’t be alarmed if a dropship shows here tonight to get you back to HQ in a hurry.”

 

“I hope you don’t get hurt.”

 

“Thanks.” He put on his roguish Shimada bodyguard grin too. “Anything you know that could help the organization with this?”

 

“I heard I am not the inside man.”

 

“It’s important.” McCree snapped on a pair of black gloves. Genji lurked as he packed his Blackwatch uniform into his travel bag, but offered nothing. The only time he tensed was when McCree approached him. The bodyguard touched the side of his faceplate. “Stay, okay? Just stay here.” Genji did almost anything he was told. “And if you’re going to water the vegetables, make sure you take the slippers off.” Genji looked down at his feet.

 

“See ya soon,” McCree proposed later, before he drove off in his red SUV with the cyborg glinting in his rearview mirror for the last time.

 

* * *

 

Halfway to Hanamura, he pulled over and unlocked the glove compartment. He thumbed on the black datapad and input his ID when the prompt appeared.

 

“What do you need, Agent McCree?”

 

* * *

 

Full moons lasted three nights. He should have guessed nothing would happen till the dark settled. Him, Genji, Hanzo: they were all nocturnal beasts. McCree departed the Castle, presumably to buy water for the search parties. He could never return.

 

Wildflowers and weeds swirled under the wheels of his car as he changed out of the crony suit and began piecing himself into his Blackwatch kit. The weeping tree and its remaining broken shrine sheltered his metamorphosis. Up the road, the estate stood empty and dark. He slid on his body armor, and tied a red bandana around his neck. From the trunk he retrieved a tactical visor like the one he had buried at Aoyama Power. It went into his passenger seat, for lack of an actual passenger. McCree pinned on his hip holster, loosened the tape holding the Peacekeeper to the belly of the driver’s chair, and loaded the revolver with red-tipped bullets. _Trust me._

 

Genji could really move. Blackwatch’s surveillance drone only detected his departure a few minutes before McCree arrived, but he had already leaped down the mountain nearly to Aoyama. He had probably dashed by just out of the range of McCree’s headlights.

 

If he had left earlier, if he had been faster, if he had taken his shift last night, if he had been better, if he had been sober all those weeks ago, if he had been perfect, like Genji. Genji did not miss a beat. Genji was on a mission.

 

With the drone pinging GPS guidance, he followed the cyborg to Hanamura. Genji flirted with the village borders, ultimately passing it to gun for another of Fuji’s foothills. McCree left the car on auto and patched the potential destination to the ops technician. No Shimada facilities were known on that mountain.

 

He smoked, panning the window down. Engineered frogs peeped from sakura crowns along some exhausted tourist track, pale blue and verdant green bodies confetti in the branches. He pushed the engine, the SUV complaining about the recommended speed limit, but obliging him. Genji was not faster than the car, but with the lack of other headlights to obscure his passing, McCree set a follow distance of four kilometers. The drone hunter remained directly over Genji’s head, at an orbit of eighteen kilometers. It had trouble following him in the thick of the trees. McCree recommended using a heat signature, but got a note back that no unusual temperatures were recorded in the target area. Useless machines.

 

The datapad pulsed white across his face as his technician messaged him.

 

_TEC: Area info of note – government owned. Both extinct subspecies of Japanese wolf lived there._

McCree set his jaw hard enough to burn. Another note popped up.

 

_TEC: Sorry._

_TEC: Looks like pre-electronic records deleted. Have people working on it._

“Jesus.” He looked out the window. Cherry trees and fake frogs for tourists, slivers of farmland, and all signs of civilization had retreated from his path. Either side of the route was clogged in tall, wiry black trees, roots encroaching like octopus legs. Birds sang even in the night, dampened by the occasional mournful percussion of an owl. He pulled over.

 

He picked up his passenger, and blew the dust out of its eye cavities. A cloth and glass wax worked for the exterior of the visor pane, lanolin for the padded interior of the faceplate and frame. McCree smiled over his work, thinking horse tack and motorcycles. He fit his face into the ebony plasmetal shield, hooking the straps around the back of his slick, tied hair. His reflection in the windshield changed as he latched the armored frame over the back of his skull, two blue stars lighting up where his eyes had been, and scales of metal flexing into comfortable vigil down his neck. Might have made him look a bit of a hairless black turtle, or maybe a burnt bird skull, but he appreciated the easy datapad comm link and the nightvision.

 

The forest cleared out its mysticism in passes of black and white from the visor’s digital reconstruction. Extreme temperatures would have come up colorful if there were any. He locked the datapad hub back in the glove compartment, and switched off the auto-drive and headlights both, which gave the SUV a conniption. The machine had no choice but to acquiesce with McCree’s directions. A red objective line appeared on the visor pane, and McCree nudged the car back on track. He raced against lost time, up the mountain, air cooling till he had to shut the window. Genji’s path twisted off into the forest on his right. He stayed on the road, assuming it would bring him to any place of significance faster than a trudge through the antediluvian trees.

 

Instead he nearly ran over the peeling red archway and picnic tables of an expired scenic overlook while he was hanging his head against the driver’s window glass, scouring for breaks in the forest. Luckily the SUV put its foot down, activating the auto-brake.

 

McCree returned to the turn-off and sat back into his seat warmer, staring down the monochrome thicket of old woodland. His objective pinged a kilometer out, pace slowed to walking speed. “O-kay,” he sighed as he hauled himself from the car. He stepped on more leaves than soil to enter the forest, yet the canopy above remained robust, blocking all moonlight from the earth.

 

Bushes thronged between black trunks, he waded as much as walked. His Blackwatch gear did not tear; McCree was thankful for the chaps. His visor flickered, static scanlines drifting across his left eye, and he had a brief sense that if the outdated equipment gave out he would be running blind in the abyssal wild. He never saw any of the birds he heard singing.

 

Water. The old familiar roll of thunder down the mountain. Aside from pinning down the correct Japanese hillside, he did not even need the drone. McCree slipped from jog to run, because the trees had to part for a river and free him to the night sky, right? Diamonds of light interlaced across the brush ahead. Naturally the drone lost Genji’s position after he exited the treeline, and defined a pale red search area around the closest bend of the river.

 

McCree’s boot clacked into a hard barrier half-drowned in leaves and it stung even through the combat metal. His pride hurt more as he landed prone in the forest litter, though his visor hit a mound of dirt that muffled his curses. Rubbing the back of his wrist on his metal chin, he turned over and lifted his foot off the trickster: some kind of white stone. McCree sat up on his dirt throne and picked the object from the soil.

 

The base, the thing he had kicked into, was a rectangular limestone marker, and on top rested a carving of a wolf paused in its stride with its head cocked, staring through him. McCree touched the points of the triangular ears, and brushed under the long, static fluff of the tail. Line figures cut under the wolf’s eyes. The carving was heavy in his hands, and he did not see any cracks from where he had kicked it. He looked across the treeline and saw more of the white ghosts stationed along the forest borders. Some guarded obvious pilings of dirt, others oversaw only leaves and new flowers. He got to his feet, setting his wolf down, shoulders clenching as the orderly white lines ran off to either side as far as his nightvision could navigate.

 

There were available walking spaces between the statues, he had just been too hasty to see them. He edged through the field of sentries onto the bank of the river, and the perimeter of the drone’s search area. The woods yielded to pale water reeds, crystalline sand, and a single weeping tree with gray leaves. It was a false willow (he didn’t know the proper name for it) like the one at the estate, but much larger. The lone tree stood about thirteen meters off; McCree made it his first marker.

 

A bitter wind kicked into the side of his helmet from the north. He looked up the moonlit waves of the river to the higher mountainside, but the static lines returned, now cracking both eyes of his visor. McCree hunched, knocking the side of his mask, turning his face away: perfect nightvision returned. He pursed his lips, glancing upriver again-- still static. He flipped up the visor goggles. The ears of the tactical helmet rang. He adjusted the noise cancellation, dumping the stirrings of the river, the thunderous wind, the restlessness of the birds.

 

The mountainside made a cliff to the north, and the river a waterfall. Second marker. His own footsteps sounded like a giant’s earthquakes as he approached the water’s edge beside the lone tree, boots grinding into the sandy soil. Could Genji drown? His file had left out a lot of critical details. McCree looked around at the obvious footprints he pounded in the sand, reminded for some reason of Genji’s assault on the tatami.

 

But there were other prints too.

 

Slender, kind to the land. He wanted to run into the water in case _Genji_ was trying to find out if Genji could drown, but forced himself to follow the path. It was not direct to the river, but under the weeping tree. McCree squatted for a better peek under the skirt of branches. There he was, kneeling on the silver sand. No wonder the idiot drone could not pick him up. He lifted the helmet’s noise cancellation; surprising Genji was never a wise idea even when it could be done, but he needed to appreciate the cyborg’s own soundscape to know the right moment to call out.

 

Of course, Genji probably practiced unconscious noise filtration of his own. He often complained about being unable to hear his own heart. McCree told him the truth: it was like that for everyone. He bit his lip as he closed on the prayer beneath the tree. Something next to bent legs, too knotty to be a sword. McCree stopped, hunching again. The edges of Genji rippled on the high wind: black hair waved over his disproportionately armored southerly shoulder, ropes of cloth flickered around his waist. McCree took another look at the weapon beside him.

 

It was a bow.

 

There were people in the world who froze like deer in the face of their mistakes.

 

McCree, without fail, always drew his gun.

 

He aimed the nose of the Peacekeeper at the bowed center mass of the long black hair. He stitched together the yellow detail of the Shimada crest on Hanzo’s unarmored shoulder. White pants, some kind of metal belt. He had never seen Hanzo wear anything but suits. He had never seen Hanzo kneeling to anyone. McCree ticked down his visor goggles: the static was gone. His glowing blue eyes fixed on the back of the Shimada boss’s head.

 

Where the hell was Genji? McCree cocked the Peacekeeper’s hammer, the clink of metal church bells in his ears but surely not audible to Hanzo over the river and the north wind. The man’s shoulders sank the moment after, but he did not move, or pick up the bow glittering next to him like a thin beached fish. Breathing his nerves out, McCree risked a look over either of his arms. The river disappeared south, north was the waterfall. His eyes scaled the cliff face, picked out the gray gleam at the very top.

 

He bit back on his cheek and pulled the revolver off its course. Genji had a perfect view of him, and would not forgive thievery. Why he had not stuck his katana through Hanzo’s back and spared McCree this moment remained a puzzle. Honor, he thought with a wretched disgust choking his throat. Did honor mean calling Hanzo out from a clifftop? Fucking drama queens. He backed off to the treeline and hiked north.

 

Kept telling himself he had not been hired to kill both Shimadas as he holstered the hungry revolver.

 

Three years of his life and he was being held at bay by a sword he could not see.

 

The black and white waterfall cut itself on fang-shaped rocks at the base. McCree climbed one as a shortcut to the next level of the cliff, mist speckling his visor pane. The drone announced it had identified the primary mission target, and set an objective line behind McCree back to Hanzo. McCree struggled not to start howling with laughter, even if the moon was full. When he finally wormed over the top of the cliff, his clothing was greased in a soup of mud and algae. Water droplets glistened across the top and right side of his helmet like the compound eyes of a thousand insects. He dragged himself on his elbows through the moss and clover along the raised riverbank, trying to make sure he got a bead on Genji and could plot an approach rather than accidentally surprising him.

 

Genji, etched in moonlight. Every mechanical angle hard beneath the white bloom. Rising from a kneel on a flat stone in the middle of the raging river, his reflection descending into the current beneath him. At first he had to agree with the drone: the cyborg offered no heat signature for his tech to latch onto. But soon thermal coloring applied a red tone to Genji's surface layers, boiling to snow at the core. As McCree watched, the crimson edges darkened, and gouts of cloud thrust between the lines of artificial muscle, starting along his right arm, before steaming out from the uniform around his torso, ejecting from the back of his neck. His chest acted out substantial breaths, like a diver fresh to oxygen, but McCree could not hear the air intake.

 

Aside from the messy sloshing of the river, the only noise he did hear was a rattlesnake’s tail, a slow hum like the drawn hiss of a crocodile, the scream of a hawk over the desert-- and little bird songs. He used the helmet to suppress the river again, and the second sound deepened, incorporating a hundred other animal notes and the rumble of landbound thunder. It was coming from Genji. Was that synthesizer capable? A gush of burning tire stench infiltrated his mask and he shook his head, choking on real smoke. Was it the sound of Genji’s body burning?

 

The visor was pointing out surface temperatures too high to be anything McCree had cuddled up with at night. The cries of the immolating body vibrated through the wet soil under him. In black and white, the individual strands of Genji’s right arm began to split and stretch, drops of gray melting into the river. Genji’s breaking hand reached up and drew his katana, his visor leaning towards the moon.

 

Static started creeping across McCree’s visor pane again. But he saw the black strut of Genji’s upper arm appearing between the corroding strands of muscle, hand still fixed rigid on his sword hilt.

 

“Genji!” he called, pushing up on his knees. Genji’s visor whipped down at the shore, staring blank through the steam clouds at first, then ducking at McCree when the senior agent climbed to his feet. McCree waved both his hands, his reflection in the shallows a dark mockery: a sinister bald lump with electric blue eyes. Genji hunched, pivoting around completely toward him. More patches of extreme heat bubbled through his body like luminescent tumors.

 

Something _snapped_ the air directly in front of McCree’s visor. He felt the suction and blast of changing pressures through the bandana around his neck, and a wave of the volcanic heat effect off Genji’s skin. Genji was still in the middle of the river. McCree’s words to encourage him to shore and safety died in his throat as he searched the atmosphere with his nightvision.

 

“You do not belong here!” Genji screamed in Japanese, and static blew over the entirety of McCree’s goggles. He flipped the blue-eyed pane up and looked with his naked eyes.

 

In front of him, all around Genji, reflected double on the water just like the cyborg, was a green dragon.

 

It moved like an ink blot, shrinking to wrap against Genji’s decaying arm, bloating out to swim across the atmosphere and glide past McCree with sparkling lashes of its spiny paddled tail. The edges dripped out of substance, coalesced into spikes and razor scales, and as it circled behind Genji its jaws wrenched impossibly wide, spitting out a second half-formed head between the fangs. Both heads shrieked, eyes sunken in, whiskers and frills flayed apart by the sound. Their pearly skins sloughed off lines of fish-like bones and returned, and their incredible shine began to distort and peel.

 

McCree could hear his own heart.

 

He kept his left hand raised, tucking the right over the Peacekeeper. As Genji roared “You are not allowed here!” from his peace rock, McCree backed up and noticed his retreating reflection: black as the night, no hat, cast in armor, the red tongue of his bully wagging obscenely in the wind. Nothing routine about it, except maybe the blue eyes of the useless visor folded against his forehead. “ _The dragon consumes…_ ” Genji ranted weakly, like some kind of half-remembered or imitated prayer, lines of black coolant polluting the rock and the river underneath him.

 

“Wait--” McCree insisted. “No! It’s me!” _It’s McCree, it’s me, it’s me, it’s me._ He used his left hand to tear the helmet frame from his head, decoupling the front of the tactical mask, yanking out his hair tie. The green dragon plunging in and out of Genji’s chest began to churn back toward solidity, its second head evaporating to a single jawline and an eyeball boiling over.

 

Genji’s oath creaked into silence. The cyborg leaped smoothly from his perch toward the shallows by McCree.

 

But the dragon followed him with fitful undulations of its shattered body. McCree’s heart spun like a readied chamber.

 

Before Genji landed, the cowboy flipped up his revolver and fired.

 

The man downriver jumped to his feet, the water before him still playing with the echoes of a gunshot. His bow was in his hands, but the river teased him, refusing to give a heading. He could not even figure where the bullet landed. Maybe the assassin was a bad shot. He fled across the water, footsteps gone in a wink of watery moonlight. The inviolable body of a fallen dragon, at whose feet all came to rest? Another gross lie, gone with a revolver blast.

 

Genji still landed perfectly, sword folded back from McCree. No moonlit sparkle to suggest an exit wound: had probably lodged in the spine plates. Genji’s eyeframe rose from the inexplicable red pumping free of his chest to glow into McCree’s pale brown eyes.

 

And the dragon was still surging in behind him, split jaws ever-open, maw bright, protruding through his body. Guts in McCree’s hands, eyes screaming. Genji’s visor flashed in his face.

 

“Je--”

 

McCree’s revolver went off five more times.

 

The cowboy shook in the night, cold with sweat.

 

The steaming carcass of a dragon lay dark in the red shallows before him.

 

“I’m sorry,” he swallowed more than said. He swayed low to get the tactical helmet frame, which had the datapad comm link inside, and stumbled off toward the edge of the cliff. He stuffed the helmet piece in his mouth and used his hands to reload the Peacekeeper. “Need dropship my position,” he grunted as he extended his right arm off the waterfall precipice, nailing the barrel at the weeping tree downstream.

 

No one there. He spit out the pieces of the tactical helmet and stood on the edge, still aiming, sweeping the muzzle back and forth across the river’s southern shores. He was no sniper, but to good eyes, distance could be immaterial.

 

He limped when he came back. Probably sprained his ankle on the statuette, just never noticed till now. “You goddamn liar,” he huffed at Genji as he sat down in the wave of blood downstream of the Shimada’s body. He immediately thought of the cigar box in his pocket, picked it out, then threw the soaked trash into the water.

 

McCree looked at Genji’s prone faceplate, immersed in the shallows. He bent and tried to get his hands under the charred gray torso to turn Genji over. Genji's right arm rested a little further aside, still holding the sword.

 

Heat lacerated his fingers the moment he made contact, and he dropped Genji. Cursing, he pulled his hands in against himself, staring at the holes in his gloves and the blistered red roses peeled open on his palms.

 

Two UFOs dropped out of the sky, shedding their camouflaged skins for their true black color. They bobbed in happy unison around the top of the waterfall, till one quaked down in front of McCree, and the other dove to the lower river. The second ship settled briefly by the weeping tree, hover jets staining the sand and burning the reeds. A few small drones tumbled out of the cargo hold, sampling Hanzo’s footprints and the silver water, then wandering into the woods to pick at the wolf statues and dirt mounds.

 

Medical techs in hazmat gear came out to deal with Genji, hauling him from the water with heat-resistant gloves that looked like they were made of aluminum foil. Someone came back for the right arm and the sword. McCree they told to pack into the ship before they treated him. Most of treatment was picking the remains of his gloves cleanly from his fried fingers.

 

He looked at Genji across the metal aisle, and there was a steady brook of water dripping out of his helmet's chin and turning to steam, but it did not seem to bother any of the medics. “Hey, make sure you get my hat when you hit the car,” McCree rambled at a technician that passed by him with a tablet, which earned him a penlight in the eye from his own attending medic.

 

They posted some kind of monitor on the wall above Genji, and colored signals moved around on it. It kept flatlining when the instrument tips melted. When the hazmats seemed to have moved off for a consultation with Mercy in the comm area, McCree got up and shambled over to the cyborg. He rested his bandaged hand-mittens on the corner of the rough heat blanket they had laid Genji out on. He leaned his ear over the bullet hole in Genji's silent chest a while. “I’m real sorry,” he pledged. “It’ll be o-kay. You look a lot better than last time. I bet you thought I was brave enough for ya.” McCree smiled, all youth and dimples. “But you know, the hat is just a hat.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : Welcome home. 
>   * Technically tomatoes are a fruit.
>   * _maneki-neko_ : a good luck charm that looks like a cat with a raised paw
>   * Is Overwatch HQ in Zurich or Geneva? A lot of people choose Zurich because it's Mercy's home base. I choose Geneva because it houses the second-largest United Nations office outside of the NYC headquarters. :P
>   * _fusuma_ : a sliding wall made of paper and wood, often painted, can be used to rearrange room space or as a door
>   * Watching _The Wire_ should have taught me that it's a bad idea to duct tape guns under car seats.
>   * When I first started googling around for this story I found out that Genji and Hanzo's English ultimate lines are not direct translations of their Japanese ultimate lines, for example Genji's ultimate line is translated as something like "Taste the blade of the dragon god", not "The dragon becomes me". Hanzo's is less differentiated, it's a change from "Let the dragon consume you" to "The dragon consumes my foes". So blahblah there's multiple interpretations that can be applied to the ultimate lines, especially Genji's, so uh...quelle interessant!
> 



	6. Brain in a Jar

 

The eyes of Gabriel Reyes asked _what happened_. McCree thought the office felt smaller than before. Behind the bay windows, a dingy copper sunset reflected double on Lake Geneva. He had cleared out of medical and the world was becoming night again. Since Hanamura, the whole planet had been overtaken by hazy, crepuscular wilderness. In his native borderland, you could always count on the sun to be the tallest thing in the sky. In Gabe’s office, the shadows of mountains grew over it. McCree stared miles past his commander, into the still red water, unable to figure out where he was supposed to rest his feet.

 

On the boundaries of the city, little stars glided along imaginary rivers. Targets, the Deadlock thought. Fancy silver headlights on fancy high-altitude cars puttering along fancy designated toll lanes, bodies with money to steal. He was thirsty. Somewhere someone was making a postcard of the opulence, and he thought about Genji, crying on some beautiful fading wood filled with singing birds and hot spring fog. _I don’t feel good,_ like he was going to throw up, but he lacked the apparatus. City mouse, country mouse…

 

“I know you’re tired, but don’t leave me yet.”

 

That heavy voice, solid and warm between his ears, lifted McCree to a smile. Greens were supposedly scared of it, he could not guess why. Gabe was the only real thing in the whole organization, an anchor for all kinds of worthless undesirables. There had been a time when he imagined he was getting replaced by Genji, a literal new model. Hard to find a way around the thought when he had been shipped off to some foreign country, and Gabe was passing him progress notes near every week via holofilm. But here he was, three years later, still not showered, smelling like death by drowning, and Gabe spared all affection for him. If there was a question he had to ask, it was why the conference did not begin with ten minutes of yelling about trashing new baby brothers.

 

Maybe Gabe was working up to it.

 

McCree looked over the man, from the black wings of his t-shirt struggling with his hard shoulders, to the slightly overgrown crew cut tousled dark across his skull as he bent over the desktop. Gabe was trying in vain to direct McCree’s eyes to the datapad between them. He glanced up, noticed the fond preoccupation, and patiently switched the pad to a hologram display. A white web of topographic lines cut them apart, and like a child McCree focused on the shiny new light. It was a tiny facsimile of the riverside, the hell forest that guarded the banks shading in as a cloud of brackish green dots. The water was coded too blue: it had looked like molten silver to him.

 

There was a red diamond positioned beside the southern bank. He supposed that was him. Gabe started narrating the stage play, touching his fingertip to the diamond:

 

“Drone put you as lingering here for about ten seconds. A couple minutes later it ID’d the primary target as directly ahead of that position, immobile.” A blue X appeared on the diamond’s nose. The weeping tree did not make the render. “And he still didn’t move till several minutes later, when you reached the top of the waterfall…” Gabe kept talking, fluid circles of light pulsing wherever he tapped the hologram, mechanical sound effects dinging receipt of his pointing finger. “…I’m just trying to understand. Was the primary target visible to you?”

 

McCree slowly came to an understanding that the chew-out was going to be about abandonment of the objective, not his attack on a fellow agent. Gabe did not even say Genji’s name. “We made out pretty good. At least the family is sundered, and you scared Hanzo off. We’ll just have to watch that he doesn’t get recruited by Talon after cooperating with them for so long.” Same assured voice as always, same favoritism keeping the anger out, but McCree was staring through the white puzzle at the face of the so-called kingsnake he had charmed, unable to understand why Gabe kept skipping the larger issue.

 

“Yeah, I saw Hanzo…” he heard his own drawl, felt his tongue moistening his lips for the first time talking in a while. Gabe’s face tightened. “Had no doubt in my mind that if I fired, Genji would’ve killed me.” He thought the commander would take the time to consider the resurrected cyborg’s reasoning.

 

“He tried anyway!” Gabe snapped. “You shut that shit down. Should have stuck him in the head while you were at it!”

 

The hologram’s red diamond pulsed before Gabe’s eye as McCree collected himself at the other side of the desk. Had to remember Gabe had only seen the drone recording, and maybe interviewed a couple medical staff before him. He pushed his dirty hair out of his face as he considered the temple of rage on the other side of the mission map.

 

“It wasn’t like that. Sure, I was spooked--”

 

“You don’t get scared,” Gabe scoffed.

 

“Let me finish, boss.”

 

The office door pinged, and the datapad kicked the map broadcast for a stream of the exterior hallway camera feed. A Blackwatch technician in a gray turtleneck rocked back and forth in the center of the image, a bloated knapsack strung over her wiry shoulders. McCree opened his mouth in warning, raising his eyebrows at the commander. Gabe buzzed the tech in anyway.

 

She labored up to the desk, and the two men watched her struggle to maneuver the bag off her back. She plopped it down on a free corner.

 

“What’ve you got for us, Santa?” Gabe asked in his best-mannered growl. McCree stared at him.

 

“Oh I’ve never heard that one before,” the tech groaned. The first item out of the bag was McCree’s hat. Gabe turned his hand up at the cowboy with a smirk. McCree took the article, frowning. The tech retrieved his Peacekeeper next. “You’ll have to get fresh munitions from the armory, but there wasn’t any permanent water damage.” He had just opened the chamber to look, and continued running his fingers around the frame of the weapon till a staggering silence about the room caught his ear. McCree looked up at a nonplussed Gabriel and a scowling tech.

 

“Thank ya ma’am,” he mumbled. She rolled her eyes and stuck both arms down the sack throat.

 

“This one is for you, Commander. The site analysts thought you would like it.” She hefted a stone wolf from the sack and laid it across the desk. Silvery white limestone stood out on dark metal gray like Fuji’s snowcap, the contrast in the shape of a failed lupine gargoyle. McCree’s shoulders jerked back, his spine going arrow-like.

 

“The fuck is that?” Gabe inquired. The tech adjusted her glasses and pulled out a datapad, reading off it.

 

“Some kind of artifact from the mission site.”

 

“Yeah?” A touch of thunder reared in Gabe’s voice. “They already source the stone and manufacturer?”

 

“They have some other specimens they are using for that. Apparently there’s a ton of them along the river.”

 

“Well, Jesse doesn’t like it, so I don’t want it.”

 

McCree was glared at as the tech began unstrapping the sack she had already returned to her back.

 

“It’s so heavy,” she complained. Gabe’s jaw relaxed. He seized the wolf around the neck experimentally, hefting it off his desk one-handed. He tipped it back and forth, then pulled out the garbage bin from the corner to toss it in with a stony crunch. “Thanks, Commander," the tech hummed. "Well, I’m off till next Christmas.” Gabe wagged a hand at her. McCree flicked the nose of his hat out of habit.

 

Just the two of them again, no hologram to light the way. The sky past the one-sided window glass gone black.

 

“I shot him for you, boss.”

 

Gabe’s face animated, but could not find the right expression. “And ‘cause I’m never gonna let any son of a bitch do me like his brother did to him,” McCree snarled, feeling red around the eyes. “He was gonna kill himself to get Hanzo, but now you’ve got him, and you’ve just gotta be gentle, like with me…”

 

“What would I want with the Shimada?”

 

McCree thought he must have looked like someone gasping out of the sea, fishy gloss-eyed stupidity. Gabe seemed to think so, furrowing a brow impatiently at him. He held onto the back of his hat, searching his mentor’s craggy face.

 

“The dragon…”

 

“Is gone. We weren’t able to locate him in that forest.”

 

“Are you goddamn blind?! Genji!”

 

Gabe got his knuckles on the desk and was standing out of his chair, temper black in his eyes-- receding as McCree’s insistent grimace stared back at him. He blinked.

 

“The heat reaction and mechanical failure?”

 

“He…” McCree shuddered. “He was trying to say something. But I saw it. It was horrible. Went down his arm like a snake.” Gabe narrowed his eyes, slowly arresting himself to his chair. “Never seen anything like it,” McCree protested.

 

“The drone didn’t pick it up.”

 

“Yeah...yeah! I didn’t at first either. I had to take off my visor, look with my own eyes.”

 

“Shit,” the Blackwatch commander muttered. “I already gave him back to Mercy.”

 

“Doesn’t he have to go to medical to get better?”

 

Gabe's face soured at McCree. He ducked under his desk, dragged the statuette from the garbage, and started picking motes of dust and shredded paper off its muzzle. “The hell?” McCree tapped his hand on the desk, trying to recall the man from his cleaning.

 

“It’ll be a peace offering,” Gabe said.

 

“Not sure Genji would appreciate it.”

 

The old soldier laughed.

 

“Not for him.” He glanced at McCree. “Don’t you have leave? Take a ship, anywhere but Japan or the U.S. Just don’t get arrested again. …write and file your report first.”

 

“I can help you with this!" McCree's fingers dug uselessly at the metal desktop. Gabe got a microfiber cloth from one of the lower drawers and licked it. He scrubbed at a black stain on the wolf’s back.

 

“How did he get your hands? The dragon?”

  
McCree turned his palm up to inspect it.

 

"I touched somethin' that didn't belong to me, and got what I deserved. Don’t blame Genji." He showed both palms to Gabe, the skin clean and healthy tan. "Doctors already fixed it, look. I’m the one who shot _him!_ ”

 

“Yeah.” Gabe rolled his shoulders. “Why do you think he would want to see you? Get out of here, Jesse.”

 

“Just…” McCree had already backed out of his chair, but lingered over the desk. “Treat him like you did me.”

 

“Ask me to adopt an omnic while you’re at it.” Gabe lifted his head. “ _Get,_ ” he barked, imitating an old ranch hand.

 

“Yeah, boss.”

 

McCree left his commander with the wolf, the white face already cracked by his treatment of it, the rest of the body something he tried to spit-shine to perfection.

 

* * *

 

Angela rested her fingers on the elbow of the drill as it lowered into position. She glanced at her circle of doctors. One of the residents behind their huddled white shoulders gave her a thumbs-up from the monitoring station. “Beginning procedure C6-12,” she announced as she dropped her clumsy, heat-shielded hands to a switch panel and activated the drill’s preprogrammed insertion pattern.

 

She sweat even behind her face shield and environmental cloak. The drill lasers spun up glaucous blue and began drawing a seam across the dark shoulder frame, doctors reaching in to pat steaming chunks of metal away from the operation area with heavy hand-pads. Armored security drones floated behind the residents and monitoring stations, reflecting the drill’s laser light in their monocular lenses, issuing muted beeps to one another.

 

“ _Extracting core_ ,” the drill informed everyone as it retracted its laser emitting nubs with a soft _click_ , exuding three robotic fingers like the claws used to capture toys from arcade vending games. Molecule-wide strings glittered from the metal talons and roped through the seams cut by the lasers. The drill dragged out a cylinder of black shoulder material and dispensed it to the provided tray.

 

Everyone sighed as the drill withdrew and tools of greater dexterity and dentition dropped toward the shoulder to run their concerted programs. One simple vice held a canister of yellow-green coolant, waiting for its opportunity. The opened shoulder smoked, and each tool could only run a little while before requesting replacement tool heads. An entire flock of doctors was reduced to junior grease monkeys, each with her or his own assigned box of parts to offer the busy machines. Angela bit her lip as a pair of tweezers finally succeeded in prompting up the black loop of the existing coolant track within the shoulder casing.

 

“Why green?” one of the doctors asked her. Angela’s blue eyes lifted slowly to the other paneled face.

 

“It’s his favorite color,” she answered succinctly, and dropped her focus back to the procedure. A couple suited heads tipped toward each other to murmur, and soft laughter rippled through the collective.

 

After a time, the instruments floated away from the metal table and the patient, save the nanomachine instructor cords fed into his back and under his neck plating. Each of those couplers wore out every hour or so, which set a nice countdown tempo to the work and kept all the residents on their toes. It was all necessity, despite the remote pressure Angela exacted on his central processor with the appropriate tablet, and the directly administered sleeper nanites from the red bullets embedded in his architecture.

 

Angela referred to her makeshift control board, depressing a sequence of switches. The newly inserted coolant canister, and five others like it, projected from the shoulder frames and released fitful puffs of lime smoke. Everyone glued eyes to the heat maps projected on the walls.

 

After a couple minutes, she was surrounded by clapping and cheers. “Now we can get to work,” she informed the celebration calmly, leaning forward to frame her bulky gloves around one of the bullet holes in the torso, the one at the center surrounded by a wellspring of charred blood. Like fresh tool heads, her residents filtered in-between the doctors and peered at her expectantly. “Undress him,” she ordered. “We’ll replace it.”

 

The work would still demand heat protection for a few hours: her residents dug their gloves into the seams between muscle patches, lifting away slabs of molten flesh with heat bubbles baked into the surface. Plenty of the external layer had already dissolved down the patient’s sides, mucosal gray sludge caked to the heat blanket. Angela recommended an acid formula to start cleansing the detritus from the frame, and approached the helmet and inactive visor. A resident exchanged her gloves from her upheld hands, and with the new articulation she was able to activate the faceplate clasps.

 

Tan-colored water spilled out under her fingers. She tried to lift, only to find the standard heft of her forearms would not unstick the plate from the patient’s head. Angela sighed. “Print another copy of the face data,” she ordered one of her residents, before tensing her shoulders and wrenching the plate off. A few of the senior observers coughed, there was muttering about the smell.

 

Angela stroked the patient’s bifurcated cheek, and prodded one finger between his lips, which still existed but had fused together like heat-stressed wax. She gripped the helmet crest for purchase, digging her fingers into the mouth. The oral cavity was full of water. She adjusted the head onto its side and most of it washed out of the torn lips and nose. A vacuum tube dropped to let her dry the throat, but she was still considering whether or not she would just rebuild the area. Maybe she should tell them to wait on the face too. She could make some adjustments.

 

She accepted a jug of acid preparation and cleaned the head personally.

 

Gabriel was waiting in the observation room when she went out for a break.

 

“You okay?” He held out a thermos of what she imagined was coffee.

 

“What time is it?” she asked as she walked past him in her scrubs, picking up the caduceus staff leaning on the wall and pointing the nose of it at her own face.

 

“Eighteen hundred.”

 

“Then we’re working faster than I expected, and that is good,” she murmured as the gentle light of the staff adhered to her body like a coat of warm milk. “This isn’t the kind of tech I should leave out,” she added, before he could say anything. She could feel the wrinkle of his eyebrows at her back. She carefully abandoned the staff exactly where it had been resting.

 

She tried to stroll back past the commander to her work, but he stuck a sheaf of holofilm blueprints out in front of her. He had holstered the thermos on his belt, like it was a gun.

 

“I had one of my weapons guys put this together.” Angela pinched the top of the film, eyeing the schematics with distaste. “So, whenever you get to putting the limbs back on.”

 

“I am amazed you still want him.”

 

“Can’t help mechanical failure.” Gabriel smiled toothily, and Angela blushed. “Besides, otherwise I spent a lot of money to _not_ kill a guy only armed with a bow.”

 

“You know, that organization appears defunct either way. Hanzo is gone. Isn’t that good enough?”

 

“Nothing is as good as dead,” Gabriel snorted. “Message me when you start testing the dragon.”

 

* * *

 

Angela cracked open the red sphere she had pulled from the patient’s chest.

 

The remaining plasma splattered all over her worktable. A robotic arm delved into the shattered plasmetal pouch and lifted out her prize: a human heart with a bullet hole right in the cross of the aorta and pulmonary. Veins and arteries detached from the support envelope and open ends were capped off automatically by rings sewn into the organics. The heart muscle was lobster red and blistered by heat, it started to fall apart. The arm slipped it into an anti-gravity field suspended between two caduceus units.

 

Angela fished through the sphere casing with her fingers, nudging aside stray pieces of biomatter, tracing the fragmented metal of the rear wall. She pried at the eye of the jagged cobweb, ultimately calling the machine arm back to dig out a compressed red chunk of lead. The doctor turned the defeated bullet between her fingertips. _Tactile opportunity,_ she thought, before discarding it in a tray.

 

She looked up hopefully to the caduceus beam, but nothing had changed. The muscle was mostly necrotic. She used one finger to nudge it into a gentle spin, examining the backside, which had blown out with the bullet and burnt black. The caduceus did report some healthy, uninfected cells in the left atrium. Angela took off her gloves and scooted her work stool over to a nearby computer, setting a target for both the robotic arm and the nearby 3D printer. She already had a new spherical casing resting in a tray of disinfectant next to its imploded counterpart.

 

The arm plunged into the heart, took a scraping of the relevant cells, and transferred them to a sterile solution in the printer’s analysis compartment. The printer immediately acidified the solution pH and spun the mixture to disassemble the cells. In conjunction with Angela’s program, it began constructing a new heart in its output chamber. Angela spent the construction time disposing of the old version and disinfecting her workspace.

 

She let the machines insert the retaining rings into the new heart’s tubing, and mesh individual vessels to the interior of the support sphere. Spidersilk lines ending in electrochemical nodes bent toward the suspended muscle, preparing to generate a life-giving pulse.

 

“Wait,” Angela murmured. She looked over her fresh set of gloves, and slowly lifted her fingers into the web of nodes. _Tactile opportunity._ The backs of the nodes stuck onto the center of each fingertip like little diamonds. She reached out and massaged the freshly derived genetic material, tickling the interlock of aorta and pulmonary, smiling behind her surgical mask. “Come on, Genji.” A trace of electrical charge numbed her fingertips. The heart began beating in her hands. Angela folded it tenderly into the sphere. She ran her finger down the insertion scar and the sphere’s nanite population sealed it, clearing the surface opacity so she could view the fitful ticks of the organ inside a pleasant pink bubble.

 

“ _Dweee…_ ” one of the security drones complained behind her. Angela pursed her lips at the reedy-voiced interruption, but looked over her shoulder.

 

Her patient was sitting up on the metal operation table. The drones bustled up to him, vice-grip appendages opening and closing on the air like a gathering of massive crabs. His head did not move: he could not see at this stage, he had been opened up for inspection of the central processing unit. Angela counted four intact, fully inserted nanomachine trainers dangling silvery from his back. She ripped off her gloves and consulted her tablet. None of the anesthetic instructions had altered in the slightest.

 

He bent his newly installed right arm frame at the elbow, movement stiff without the supplemental muscle layer. Like an irresistible instinct, he pushed his skeletal hand into his opened chest cavity. His fingers hit the back of the popped white ribcage, but continued fumbling through the emptied space. Somewhere in his grasping he activated the reload mechanism in the arm frame, and froze as a triple-line of metal stars lined up along his forearm. The first three rolled up grooves in the back of his hand, tumbling from his static fingers and spilling down his front.

 

Angela opted for brute force in the face of this unknown: she added new chemical options and administered a fresh dose of sedative nanomachines through the support cords. His arm dropped, then he pitched down on his side. The drones honked at him for the sudden motion, but as the stillness persisted, they glided back to their original stations around the room.

 

A couple residents leaned in from the prep area to wag take-out bags alluringly at Angela, only to notice the awkwardly crumpled patient. They threw down their baggage and tried to approach, only to be blocked by a drone that noticed their casual attire. They ran back out to change into their scrubs. Angela stayed rooted to her work stool, watching the processor activity.

 

When she felt it was safe to stand, the residents returned and moved the patient onto his back to receive his new heart. Angela chained it dead center, the aesthetic position. McCree had probably thought he would miss it firing there. She leaned down beside the inert metal skull to whisper an encouraging “good as new”.

 

She could not resurrect.

 

But she could approximate.

 

* * *

 

Braids of green light reared over the patient’s shoulder, tumbling down his arm strut, past the naked shuriken procurement trails and out to his palm. Spines lifted from the center line of the phenomenon, melted, faded. Sometimes a mouth-like orifice gaped at the end, filled with fangs.

 

“Honestly I was expecting more,” Gabriel said as the image coughed out and coolant gas popped from skeletal black shoulders.

 

“Simulation should improve as I get closer to genuine trigger conditions,” Angela answered. They were sitting on a couch at the back of the observation room, leaving the greedier access spots to other members of the medical staff. Everyone wanted to see a real, live dragon. “It tires him out though.”

 

“Nothing he is going to resent us for…?”

 

“He’s not awake.”

 

“Mostly,” Reyes muttered. He leaned into the cushions, tapping the sides of his coffee mug. Angela glared at him. He always seemed to know, brown eyes shifting away from the hanging machine behind the glass to meet her. Eyes that should have been warm, but had too much experience for it. “Probably better to wake him up and ask him to summon it, if you can’t figure it out.”

 

“I need to be sure his temperature is not going to spike past what the system can handle.” For now, that quelled the commander’s protest. But once again, Angela found herself on limited time.

 

The door slid open and Jesse McCree came jangling into the observation room, stomping straight for the viewing window. Angela started onto her heels, Gabriel reaching over to take her mug before the coffee flew from it. “Get out!” she yelled at the cowboy. McCree reared on one of his determined steps and swung his boot around to face them, mouth open in surprise, eyebrows shot up into his hat. “You don’t belong here!” Angela snapped. The killer’s lips wilted to one side in a wounded pout.

 

“I’ve certainly heard that before darlin’,” he sighed.

 

“How did you get the door code?” Gabriel wondered in between sips from Angela’s mug. McCree pointed at the doctor.

 

“One of her people is sellin’ it.”

 

“Mm.” Gabriel smirked as he drank, opening his tablet to a gallery of personnel photos. He handed the tablet to McCree, who scrolled down the lines for a few seconds before jabbing his finger at one of the images and returning the device. “Didn’t know you’d be so eager for assignment you’d hunt me down the second you got back,” the commander said as he started typing out a text. “How was leave?”

 

“Was fine,” McCree advanced noncommittally.

 

“Make him _leave_ ,” Angela ordered Gabriel.

 

“Sure.” Gabriel was still smiling. “Go have a look at the project, Jesse.”

 

“He ain’t a project,” McCree grumped, but clinked over to the window. It was easy for the tree-like oaf to peer over the hedge of scientists. The cowboy silhouette rocked back and forth, then stiffened. “Wh-- that’s not Genji. That’s an omnic or somethin’ right? Where is Genji Shimada?” McCree took down his hat, turning it in circles in front of his chest as he looked to Gabriel. “I told ya to be gentle with him.”

 

“And I am, by not waking him up till he’s fully assembled. Use your head. Would Mercy hurt him?” Gabriel extended his hand in royal presentation to Angela. McCree stared at her, his mouth opening, dumb as a fish. He glanced at the patient one more time. The testing algorithm had just initiated another summoning, the materialization stage glowing down the sketch of an appendage.

 

“’Scuse me.” He staggered out the door, back of his arm planted to his mouth.

 

“He’s gone,” Gabriel reported.

 

“Is he ill?” Even if it was McCree, her fingers itched for a syringe. Or maybe especially because it was McCree.

 

“Guess you don’t actually know how people work, Doc.” Gabriel picked up his tablet again, opening a file called _26._

 

* * *

 

Angela dialed down the anesthetic influences in the order she calculated, but the patient shot awake when only half had been removed. She pressed her lips together and kept to her schedule as his gray eyes took in the retrofitted egg-shape of the operation suite.

 

“I’m home,” he mumbled in Japanese, and shut his eyes again. The vice restraint loosened from his mid-torso, letting him down on his feet and expecting him to stand. He did, arms limp against his sides. Angela set aside her tablet and approached, winding an arm over his hips, tapping her fingers on the cream armor laced down his torso.

 

“Welcome home,” she answered, smiling. Genji lifted his hands toward the limbs on him. Then his eyes opened, caught on hers and his pupils dilated. If she had her pen light, she could have sampled the endorphin influence in micrometers. His hands shuddered open, and dropped without removing her.

 

“Hi Angela.”

 

She tilted her head, still smiling in suggestion. The corners of Genji’s lips twitched up.

 

“Hello Genji,” she greeted, as a reward. “I dyed your hair.” Genji’s gaze went a little unfocused, rising after a few seconds as if he could see his own sweep of green.

 

“Thank you.” He did not focus on her right away, eyes drawn to a wolf statue posed on the worktable beside the 3D printer.

 

“Something familiar, I hope,” she hummed, taking her left arm from his back and tucking it behind her own. Genji cocked his head down at her.

 

“Where ever did you hide my helmet?” he chuckled. The trio of security drones hovering behind Angela opened and shut their claws. She pulled out the helmet frame and faceplate and presented them with a flourish. “Oh…?” Genji touched the chrome pieces, pulling out the ribbon hanging from the back, tickling the partial face mask embedded to the frame's jawline. She let him secure on the frame, but locked in the faceplate herself. The visor clicked on. “Everything is working,” he said, before she could ask.

 

“You can blame Gabriel for the fancy parts,” she said, rubbing both hands over the kanji at the top of the abdominal armor plate. Genji looked down, and startled bad enough to rock himself off-balance. One black heel set behind him to keep him from falling over. She gave his torso a squeeze. “It’s alright. Please,” she begged. He relaxed straight in her embrace. “You’re safe here. We had to reconstruct some things, but you should be able to call your dragon now without getting hurt.”

 

Genji took a while to respond.

 

“I guess the cat is out of the bag.” He paced himself through the expression, switching to English on the same breath. “I am sorry to have caused you so much work.”

 

Angela shook her head, sliding back till her hands were just over his hips, looking him in the visor.

 

“You are a model patient. It doesn’t feel like work at all with you.”

 

Genji lowered his head, and she was giddy to think he was trying to bow, but quickly realized he was studying the new armor plates again. “I’ll explain what all the parts are. The most important ones are on your shoulders.” The visor tilted right and he flexed his arm to look at the green canister insets briefly. Then he gazed down again.

 

“Do you have a copy of my uniform? I may have ruined the ones I was given before,” he asked.

 

“Oh…it would not fit over this new exoskeleton.”

 

Genji reached down and touched the top of his armored thigh. Angela followed his fingers as they drifted inward, coming to rest on the flat red-gray space between his legs. “Um, Genji?” She let go of him, reeling her hands in to her own torso.

 

“Is there a way to get some cloth to cover this?”

 

She looked between his visor and groin sharply.

 

“Of course,” she answered. “I will print you a piece to fit over it. Follow me!” Genji trekked after her to the worktable and printer. She struggled to push the wolf statuette out of the way, then pulled up her stool to the computer. There was already a model of his construction and dimensions in the databank. “Cloth may tear too easily, so let’s make some more flex armor. We can color match to what’s on your back…so…” Her hands fluttered as she initiated the print, before dropping into her lap. “You have never been so modest before,” she laughed. “I am sure no one would even think about it, but all the same, I want you to be comfortable.”

 

The printer finished with a beep. “Just stand still a moment,” Angela instructed as she lined up the dark polygon between his legs. She affixed the front edge beneath the abdominal shield and smoothed the layer from front to back before securing the other end beneath the tailbone plate. Nanite meshes programmed themselves together and another couple strokes ensured the armor rested slick on its foundations.

 

She called a hardlight mirror for Genji to examine himself in. Angela did not think the area looked significantly changed, aside from color. Genji watched his reflection, moving on from the added plate eventually, raising one hand to the permanently flexed vents along his torso. He stuck the tip of his thumb against the black undercarriage visible through the openings. He turned around and peeped over his shoulder, grabbing his helmet ribbon out of the way.

 

His white hand laid over his exposed rump, visor blinking. Fingers rose to the dramatic seam above it that marked the join of his upper and lower body. He bent and reached for the silver inlays gleaming on his calf-- Angela took his hand. “Please don’t play with it. I will go over the schematics.” Genji’s fingers trembled under hers. He turned back around.

 

“That is better, thank you.” He grazed one more piece, the number _25_ emblazoned on his shiny chrome chest guard. The writing was backwards in the mirror. Angela touched it.

 

“This is because I take pride in my work,” she explained, warm with honesty. “I hope that you can live well like this.”

 

“You try so hard to keep me alive,” Genji laughed. He flexed his weight onto his toes, and back down. “Am…am I taller?”

 

“Just about four centimeters, we needed a little more room for some of the cooling elements.” And she could look up at him at a sharper angle now, when they stood together. Angela smiled to herself, but Genji was attracted to the expression, visor glowing softly at her. “I know it may be hard to think of, but you are older now. Maybe it is appropriate.” She wagged a finger at him.

 

“Is anything the same?” He inspected the grooves in his right hand, jumping in place when the cover on his arm slipped open to roll out a trio of shuriken, extras lined up at the back of his wrist. As before, the weapons ejected in-between his fingers only to end up dropping in front of him.

 

“Hm…” Angela considered as he crouched to pick the stars up. “Your head was submerged a while, and your processor has good shielding. It did not take too much damage. And your heart, of course!”

 

“Jesse.” Genji touched the headguard of his visor with the tips of the gathered stars. “Jesse shot me…” He started to scratch a line down the headguard.

 

“You don’t have to speak that man’s name, or see him ever again.” Angela hugged the cyborg, fingers hooking into the vent gaps at the edges of his shoulderblades. “And your heart is fine, I promise. I’ll let you use a stethoscope later.”

 

“Did he get fired for interfering with the mission?” Genji was not hugging back. Why not, she wondered sharply.

 

“Unfortunately he is Gabriel’s favorite. I just meant you can stay here. You could work for me if you wanted.”

 

Genji was trying to put the shuriken back in his arm behind her, and laid them on the table when he could not figure it.

 

“A doctor?” He laughed a little.

 

“A medic. You are already the right color,” she praised. Genji finally touched her: he put his hands on her shoulders, separating the two of them.

 

“So I am. I wish I could.” He turned the back of his hand to her. “I think Mr. Reyes has other ideas.” Angela tugged her face away from the grooves in the white plate, grimacing.

 

“You aren’t bound to him,” she persisted. “My department has primary authorship of the technology.” Her fingers twitched on his sides.

 

“If only I deserved something so nice.” He chucked the side of his thumb to her cheek, tipping her head up. He seemed to have some grasp on restraining his strength now, despite the lack of sensation. Genji was almost gentle. “Does he have my swords?”

 

“Yes,” she admitted. It had been an oversight on her part to let Gabriel take them for some partner modifications.

 

“Can you tell me the way to Mr. Reyes’s office?”

 

“I will give you the password for the base server. It will have a blueprint you can follow,” Angela answered, eyes shining. Genji did bow deeply to her. Then he left. Angela raised a fist to her lips and bit into her knuckles.

 

* * *

 

_ATTENTION OVERWATCH AGENTS: OMNIC UPRISING IMPACT CRITICAL. SUSPECTED GOD PROGRAM ACTIVITY. CONFIRMED SUPPORT REQUEST. CLASS B TO F PERSONNEL REPORT TO HANGAR 9…_

 

Broad shoulders. Deep, sincere commands. Eternally firm. The kind of man you could nest in the shadow of for your whole life. It had never mattered to Jesse that he was not Strike Commander.

 

“Come on.” The Blackwatch boss’s hand extended from the dark gate of the dropship. Combat gloves linked together, and Gabe towed him along, into his life. “Just stay close to me, alright?” he reiterated later, and Jesse nodded, leaning into the bedtime story of one of the ship’s slot windows.

 

Upturned faceplates shimmered in firelight along the seaside streets of Algiers. Robotic arms flailed from rooftops like they might catch the passing birds in their skinless fingers. Silver bodies hoisted themselves up the minarets of pink, cobbled mosques. Clusters of reconfigured drones stomped on treads and blocky feet after their more humanoid masters. The infected ward was a matrix of chrome heads and buzzing synthesizers. Infernos danced out of looted shops at ground-level. Some omnics roved out of the pack to flip hovercars or batter crusts of refurbished fifteenth century architecture.

 

It was night, no matter how many fires burned. Orange undercurrents patched the muscle detail of Gabe's silhouette, leaning on the frame of the pilot box as he spoke with the men there. A distant airborne explosion lit a candle on the main viewscreen, umber wings and passenger wells flying apart. A dropship like theirs. The omnics below cheered.

 

Gabe pressed his fingers to his earpiece. “Morrison!” he rasped, and harangued the unseen Strike Commander's tactics. Mentioned an Isiah, which McCree took to be some kind of rocket drone he had never heard of. The dropship’s engines groaned under his boots, and it began to rise from the corridor between blue-and-white skyscrapers. McCree thought Gabe would be content with a miniature Crisis, but his teeth were out, he shouted till veins stood from his neck.

 

“Rocket impact in five seconds, Mr. Reyes,” a dull voice reported from the back of the ship. Gabe pulled out of his earpiece. McCree followed his mentor’s eyes, and discovered the green smile of a visor sticking out of an unlit passenger well.

 

"Genji," he called on reflex, out of shame for not even noticing, but the visor did not turn. Shadows surrounded McCree, blanketing him in solidity. He looked up and it was Gabriel, yanking on his restraints to make sure they were tight, and tapping the energy barrier key for his passenger well. Gabe’s concerned face withdrew from the blue glow of the shield, and he ran back to the pilot box, activating their barrier just as the ship instruments cried brassy alarm. The other passenger was left to his own devices. McCree twisted to the edge of his protection, fighting the straps crossing his heart, trying to see if Genji understood what to do.

 

The side of the ship flashed open, white flames gassing McCree’s shield, shrieks of the hellfire electronically muted. One remaining engine spun naked outside the breach, huge neon rotors exposed to the milky stars as the craft lurched onto its side. The bird got in one howling flip before it slammed into a rooftop. Ceiling and floor wrenched together, a collapsing iron lung in a guiding gravitational fist. The machine juddered to a stop, nose embedded in someone’s office building. Concrete dust, holofilm shreds, and broken glass piled over McCree. His energy field pulsed a cautionary latticework across its icy frame, but remained pressurized within the nettle-like mating of warship and commercial cubicles.

 

He dispensed the protection. With the air and crushed office furniture glitter came puffs of woody Mediterranean atmosphere, the heat of the smoking engines, and whispers of unearthed asbestos. He popped his restraints and clambered down the jumbled floor panels to the pilot box. Gabe shut off the barrier wall just as McCree reached him. The pilots were hunched over but intact. The soldier had lacked time to tie himself in: his hoodie was torn, his face a catalogue of bloody welts. He held out an opaque white sack to McCree.

 

“Bag,” he instructed. McCree clutched the sack numbly for a short grace period before instinct took over.

 

“Oh thank God,” he gurgled, and joined the two pilots in puking his guts out discretely. Gabe’s hand came to rest over his shoulder.

 

“Good call-out, Shimada,” the commander rumbled to the folded-over rear of the ship, tone perfunctory. Not a lot was making sense with his face in the bleached sanctuary of the bag, but McCree thought mostly about how strange monotone sounded from Gabe. If he hated someone, they knew it. If he loved someone, they knew. It was in the cursing. McCree tried to place where he had heard _indifference_ before.

 

Addressing security drones, maybe.

 

After McCree finished, and wiped his mouth off with the napkin from the toy pocket the bag’s side, Gabe pointed him back at the passenger bay. “Make sure he’s undamaged and await my orders,” he instructed, and turned to his recovering pilots to see if they could raise the fleet from their charred console.

 

McCree mounted an expedition through the rivers of dust and starlight, away from the warmth of the pilot box and the rattle of fire extinguishers. The tail of the ship stuck out a hole in the roof, but had broken in half on the lip. Genji’s passenger well had lodged in a vortex of concrete and support beams, and the semi-cylinder tube of the well frame jutted through a crater the ship’s belly. Even the first concrete puzzle piece burying the well looked impossible to budge. McCree tried just his hands, then kicked his boot up on the side of the ship and shoved his body weight into it. The jigsaw shuddered an inch, creaked precipitously, and tumbled off with a somber crack onto the floor below.

 

A cream-armored torso was revealed, puffing up and down, head and arms and legs locked in by a wedge of concrete and twisted metal bars, a live anchovy in a can. Silver kanji glistened from the straining chest, a baffling print of the words _god of war_ on the trapped, squirming hostage. McCree searched over Genji for a place to begin. Had an impression of heat on his hands.

 

Heard a heartbeat.

 

"The fuck," he mumbled, and the cyborg's breath simulation slowed. "It's okay." What would Gabe have said? _I'll get you out,_ first thing, but McCree did not know if he had the strength. Maybe _stop crying_. Genji was not even saying anything. One of the bullets had nailed him right in the voice box, but medical could fix that right? Gabe would have hugged that disembodied torso right there. Or maybe not. McCree recalled Ana's story about the time the soldier dragged Fareeha Amari from the pricker-laced bank of an arroyo, and she had been the one to stick herself and her muddy sundress to his shin while he stood there with his arms crossed.

 

McCree tried the block on the left side, ramming his shoulder into it. “Can't get it alone,” he panted at Genji after an embarrassing minute. “Lift your arm on three.” Segmented white fingers wrapped along the bottom of the block. On McCree’s count they pushed the it off together, and as it fell its underside full of broken metal bars twisted into view. Trails of ink stretched between the bar tips and shallow punctures in Genji's arm. The momentum of the falling chunk took the slab laid out over Genji’s head with it.

 

Genji reached around McCree and slapped away the remaining wreckage, sitting up so fast his helmet nearly smacked the cowboy in the face. Something bulged wrinkly out of his spine. McCree thought impalement, then of the observation room in medical, empty guts screwing in his belly. Genji reached behind and detached the support umbilical, nozzle wheezing steam. He collapsed back into the well frame, one knee bent with intentions of rising, the rest of the body unwilling.

 

It was not just the kanji, there was a number scrawled on Genji too, the same way drones had their model descriptions as tattoos. McCree glanced down the ship at that supposedly warm place where his boss lived. “How could you let them write on you?” he whispered in Japanese. As his hand neared the solar plexus where the characters had been inscribed Genji thrashed and shoved him out of the way. The cyborg dropped back into the ship, retreating across the passenger aisle and cycling off all the lights on his body, hunching in the dark.

 

McCree’s metal combat boots crunched onto the floor after him. “Yeah, that was my bad. I’m sorry.”

 

A prosthesis extended from the oily shadows and pointed at his belt buckle. McCree inspected the acronym. "For all you know, I bought that myself."

 

“You know better," Genji said.

 

“English, Shimada,” Gabe demanded as he hauled himself up to them. “Back-up is here.” The roof above them shook, a husky animal snarl resounding through the air, followed by the beat of bare hands and feet approaching the imploded hole in the concrete. Winston’s black and white head stuck through the punch in the ship flank.

 

“You guys okay?” he asked. “Vital signs, uh…?” Genji slinked over and grabbed Winston’s jaw, lifting himself away from the other men to squat on the scientist’s back. Winston shuffled a dark paw up to wave fondly at the cyborg. “The fleet is coming down on this position,” he continued, turning his blocky face to Gabe.

 

“Take Shimada and block the ground level entrance till we get these pilots out.”

 

“Understood.”

 

McCree ticked the holster band off his revolver and gauged the jump distance to the decayed lip of the roof.

 

“Wait,” Gabe called him, yanking a shotgun from a twisted weapons rack on the wall. He wagged the scarred barrel at the floor. “Help me find the other one.” Winston’s bellows echoed in the dark from a few stories below. “Let the freaks do their job.”

 

McCree picked at the sundered floor, hat sagging down his face. He glanced at Gabe’s torn back as the commander took another consult with the pilots and the comms. McCree shut his eyes, blurred the sound in his ears, finding the thunder better than the words. His fingers butted into pebbled metal, and he tried to get the wreckage off but it was too heavy again. No matter how long he dug at the grave...

 

An armored glove grabbed the debris and flipped it back, seizing McCree’s arm before he fell from his perch. Once the cowboy had his footing, Gabe retrieved the second shotgun. “Let’s go,” he yelled at the pilots, who unstrapped their service pistols and lined up behind him like blue-uniformed ducklings.

 

Gabe helped McCree out into the night. McCree sat on the edge of the breach, twisting his head up at the smoky sky dented with stars. A couple omnics with hulls like white porcelain and sloping pyramidal heads busted through the stairwell door to the east, smashing the barrier down with outstretched arms. Communication between the pair of them was limited to silent flickers of quartet light bars on their triangular prows. One leveled a Crisis-era assault rifle at McCree. He pegged it in the head with a revolver bullet, and the rifle beams scattered around his position. It tried to aim again, so he shot it in the nose, shaving off its top. It fell backwards, inert, lights out.

 

The Peacekeeper jerked to the second, unarmed target, and blew through its tinker toy knee joint as it tried to run behind a wall. It collapsed in a spout of black fluid, synthesizer squealing as it grabbed its detached shin. McCree got up and put a bullet through the frayed shorts covering its pelvis, and walked over to where it writhed, boots ringing. He aligned the gun with its unconventional cranium more carefully, and fired dead between the two columns of stuttering lights. The pyramid cracked like fine china.

 

McCree peered down the stairwell, and prowled the rest of the roof. “Clear, boss!” he called to the remains of the dropship. Gabe boosted the two pilots out. He tried to help Gabe, he tightened his useless hands on the soldier’s arm as Gabe pulled himself free of the wreckage. Blue, black, and orange Overwatch ships came to station above the rooftops, dispensing agents on glittering lines or short flight platforms. Sparks began to bubble over the sides of the building. A few feathery pigeon corpses scattered the roof.

 

Genji flipped over the side of the building and landed on the roof tiles. Before his green afterimage had begun to fade, a pistol bolt gnashed through the side of his stomach, impact rocking his weight atop his steady black heels.

 

“Shit!” one of the pilots cried. “I thought he was one of them!”

 

Genji gathered his feet together and pulled himself straight. Coolant bloomed down his abdomen, then petered out as internal channels redirected, tube ends capped shut. Winston hopped over the edge to land next to him. No one shot the gorilla.

 

“Fetched a new comm for you,” Winston reported, but it was Genji who walked over and held out the fresh earpiece to Gabe. The commander made the exchange without a word, and held up his hand to flag down one of the air transports. Winston nudged his glasses up his nose, shuffling closer and sniffing at Genji’s blown flank. The gorilla had wires and blood gnarled in his own fur, and a cut across his nose. He clunked his enormous Tesla cannon over his back, and pulled a blue spray vial from his belt. “I guess I missed that earlier. If it's okay, let me see if these nanomachines can hold it together.” Genji shrugged, and Winston spritzed the gaping wound. The back line of artificial muscle knit into a clumsy cerulean patch.

 

“Get these birdies out,” Gabe growled as the transport arrived, directing the pilots onto the platform. “And send me a caduceus.” He listened on the earpiece a while. “Our priority target is four blocks north, by a fountain. Winston, Morrison is letting me keep you to secure the route.”

 

“Got it!”

 

A couple buildings over, and the uprising got more crowded to the tune of thirty robots on a hot tin roof. McCree slithered on his stomach to the parapet, poking his revolver out to headshot omnics as they fired at the low-flying ships with their rifles and their curses. The reports of the Peacekeeper mixed jazz-like into the insurgency ambience at first, but when one of the robots noticed his hat and the starry wink of the barrel, a ripple of light communicated through the head dots of the rest, and they all turned his way. “Uh, sir, do you have my back?” Winston asked Gabe.

 

“Sure,” the soldier grinned. Winston flung himself over the gap between buildings. Gabe backed up, ran at the split while the omnics studied the physics of an airborne space gorilla, and landed hard on the roof behind them. McCree, who was not known for his ability to spring between ten-story heights with ease, returned to potshots at the outer rings of gangly bodies. Shotgun blasts wiped out two or three of the omnics at once as Gabe strolled to Winston’s backside, turning once he reached it to down any weapon that leveled at the massive target.

 

Genji knelt on the roof edge a meter down from McCree, hand tucked to the patch from Winston's medkit.

 

“Wait for the medic,” McCree hissed over at him.

 

“Stop distracting me,” Genji groaned.

 

"Hey. I haven't seen you in months," McCree persisted, on the hope an angel would fall to them if he just kept the other agent talking long enough. "Did they let you go on leave?"

 

"Stop...stop..."

 

"Shimada!" Gabe demanded from the other rooftop. Genji's visor snapped up and he vaulted a story into the air, falling out of the moon toward the distracted omnics.

 

_RYUU GA WAGA TEKI WO KURAU_

A sound that did not belong to Genji, but with a synthetic voice no word truly did. His throat had been stolen by his brother. The dragon that looped out of his spine and over his shoulder had gone silent too, however far its splitting jaw stretched and tried to scream. The etching of his katana lit neon, the reptile clung to his frame in an unformed neonate mist, and he swept out his arm as though it would fly away from his body. Green light reached through the necks of pale mechanical figurines, and they fell headless. The sword-tip through a larger model’s chest blew its torso apart in a spectral sparkle.

 

Winston backhanded a row of attackers into the air, and Genji’s dragon sailed through the helpless gravity. Metal softened to flesh, armored hulls pricked apart fast as skin. Synthesizers stuck on mono-notes of alarm till the severed pieces finally collapsed. Nothing was eaten, only mulched into glittering trash, sparks burning out against Genji’s slabs of muscle. He rotated the sword up and over his head like a glowing fang, broken omnic arms and drapes of wires clinging to his body in split-second flashes as he penetrated the center of the mass where the commander and Winston played defense. The dragon corroded like its victims, falling off the sword, slurring out behind Genji in a writhing tail, sloshing forward through his chest in an immaterial screech.

 

The smoky, headless monster was circling Gabriel Reyes.

 

McCree pushed off the parapet, whirling around and jumping for the next rooftop. He succeeded in cracking his elbow apart on the edge, able to get the pinky of his Peacekeeping hand onto the corner before he slipped off like a cartoon character from a pane of comically transparent glass.

 

Gabe’s hand snapped around his wrist, and as the Peacekeeper waggled shiny over the super soldier’s fingers, McCree remembered he owned a gun.

 

“What the hell, Jesse?!” Gabe roared in his face. McCree flapped his broken arm against his hat to keep it from flying off.

 

“I wasn’t thinkin’!” he pleaded.

 

“Yeah, I can see that, dumbass. This is like babysitting Morrison all over again.” As Gabe hauled him onto the roof, it began to rain. Algiers was too arid for that to be normal: it was firefighting dumps from some of the blimpy Overwatch support vehicles, dousing those areas where the uprising had been successfully suppressed. Like their rooftop: green spines receded into Genji’s shoulder, mist flowing off his arms, and every omnic lay destroyed on the wet tiles. McCree rolled onto his side, cradling his shattered left limb. “Wait for Winston to carry you over next time,” Gabe snarled, picking up his shotguns.

 

“You could carry me,” McCree advanced with a broken smile.

 

“I’ll throw you, you little shit.”

 

After rain came the sun, or at least fool’s gold. She drifted out of heaven, wings full and floating-- till a battery of rifle fire from a roof across the street tried to snipe her white-robed figure from the air. Mercy flexed her surplus appendages to her spine, glowing feathers winking out, and she plummeted. Genji hopped the distance and caught her, the orange tails of her sash wrapping around his body, his armor ebony with omnic blood. She had time to caress the side of his faceplate before they landed. Genji lowered her heels to her reflection. McCree watched his hands trace the white flares off her hips, heard her giggle.

 

The cyborg’s head jerked to the other roof, and he dashed into the air, over a stormy protest from Gabe. Genji sailed over broken street lamps to hit the side of the other building, and scampered to the roof, a spider after roaches. Mercy propped her fingers against her lips, steadying her caduceus staff on her watery afterimage, blinking her soft blue eyes. She resigned herself to spreading pixie dust over Winston, and despite Gabe insisting he was fine moved over to wag the spinning staff nozzle in his bleeding face.

 

She approached McCree. Gabe and Winston clustered to the front of the roof to watch Genji. Across the booming, exploding skies, McCree heard that tell-tale oath, and the other rooftop erupted in green light. He tipped his head back, trying to see past the shadow of his boss from his cowered coil on the ground.

 

The click of the doctor’s gold-edged heel drew his face up toward hers. Up the strange, snowy landscape of her patterned abdomen, the shrink-wrapped mounds of her breasts, to her golden halo and her hair whiter than gold. She was wearing make-up on the battlefield. McCree smartly kept his mouth shut, not that the protrusion of her staff into his personal bubble was reassuring. Mercy drew it along his stomach, and finally settled the knobby end at his arm. Three rotating pieces flicked out around the head quick as a rattler’s fangs.

 

A warm tingle cycled up his veins and skin as his elbow was repaired.

 

“Hey, that actually feels pretty good,” he laughed nervously.

 

“It came from Genji,” Mercy explained, withdrawing the gentle golden light from him and propping the staff-head up in the air. She looked out over the city, to the dragon tearing itself apart on the other rooftop. “He was a miracle in so many ways.” Her black glove slipped over McCree’s shoulder. “ _And you ruined him._ ”

 

McCree blinked, sitting up as she walked away from him. She touched Gabe’s arm too, but he could not hear what she was saying to him. With a testing rustle of her skeletal wings, she leaped from the building. At the last possible second a jet of light cast from the propulsion framework, and Mercy flew over scattered and burnt omnic heads to the cyborg on the far side. She backed Genji up behind a clothesline, white sheets flapping strobes of their closing figures.

 

Genji returned eventually. The pistol blast in his side was gone, the snakebites from the poles through his arm too, and all the little chips the omnics had taken out of him. He had a tremor in his hands.

 

"Stay on the objective," Gabe told him. Did not yell, did not offer a single curse. The dragon guided their way from then on, bursting out every time the omnics fortified to more than two or three. Its figure was less sculpted each time. Genji's steps dragged when the green venom was not wrapped around him. McCree started hearing the stumbling clicks of black metal feet at his back. Everything in Gabe's stride at the front of their unlikely flock suggested this was routine.

 

The priority target was not an armored omnium avatar or even a walker. It was a purple-bodied omnic leading others in a protest at the fountain. Was it really a god A.I. scenario? Genji split the purple’s head open with a shuriken. Most of the omnics around the fountain had not been armed, and those that were did not think to draw their weapons till their leader plunged face-first into the pool and sent tangles of lightning between the basin and the fountain's merry flowering spouts. Mop-up was easy. Overwatch ships began to depart into the growing midnight.

 

Strike Commander Morrison descended from on high and conferenced with Gabe beside the fountain as McCree leaned on a toppled statue of a man on a stallion, popping a few fleeing omnics in the back. The cowboy closed his eyes, absorbing the deep strums of the meeting of two rivers behind him, ignoring the firecracker gunfire from the other corners of the depopulated quarter, the distant screams of Japanese, and the throaty yelps of a real live animal inside a modern city.

 

“Shimada! Shimada,” Gabe paced behind McCree, alone now, chatting to the plastic curve of his earpiece. He switched channels. “Where’s Ana?”

 

“He doesn’t like being called that, boss,” McCree offered in a tender tone.

 

“Fuck him. Climb to the top of the fountain and see if you can spot him. I can’t raise him,” Gabe grumbled. McCree dragged himself over the brim of the basin, chaps blurring in the black water.

 

“’Scuse me,” he consoled the lavender body of the omnic leader as he used its hard chassis as a stepping stone. He tucked his arm against the thin trunk of the fountain, like a pirate off the crow’s nest, and tipped up his hat as he surveyed the trash heaps in the streets. Genji was an easy pick, four blocks down, hacking his katana into the faceplate of a corpse.

 

“Shimada! Shimada!” Gabe kept barking below, and McCree estimated the chances of a comm link malfunction were low. Genji turned around and decapitated another omnic running past his back. He placed one foot toward the fountain, pulled it back, then his visor jerked skyward, body going static. McCree had not heard a gunshot, or seen a spark of impact.

 

Genji’s knees sagged out from under him and he thumped over into a pile of the white pyramidals.

 

An Overwatch ship's spotlight passed right over him and the rest of the de-winged angels. As shadow returned, arms crawled out of the pile, halved bodies emerged from nests of broken wiring. The omnic that had just lost its head toppled to its knees next to Genji, only to grab his throat and drag him chest-to-chest. An electrical bolt blew in its neck and it released him-- just in time for another pair of bony hands to bring a piece of pipe crosswise down his shoulders, knocking him onto the street.

 

Genji did not get up to punish the transgression. McCree saw his head move, looking at the machines squirming out around him. The pipe wielder changed directions, turning its weapon vertical, probably aiming to drive it up one of the three green ports in Genji’s back in an effort to reach his insides. Spare hands clutched his ankles, dragging him deeper into the pile, clinging to the seams in his muscle layer and beginning to pull.

 

McCree breathed out and held his lungs airless, dropping his hand to the Peacekeeper holster as he counted targets. Five alive, one bullet to spare. His fingers made tarantula curls at his hip.

 

He drew the silver gun and pulled his trigger. Five omnics dropped, the sixth bullet burned furiously in his chamber, coughing smoke out of the barrel. Genji spooked upright. This time someone slammed the horn and scared the elk out of the headlights before the truck hit it. The cyborg wriggled out of the garbage and limped onto his feet, his katana hanging from his hand with its tip on the ground. He swayed, and his weight tricked him into taking a step. Another, another, till he dragged himself into an alleyway, disappearing from view.

 

“What the hell are you doing?” Gabe asked.

 

“Woo! Got those slot-eyed sons of bitches!” McCree waved his hat off his head, grinning wildly.

 

“Get down,” the Blackwatch commander sighed. “Did you see Genji?”

 

“Nah.” It came out easy and affable and charming. He stood around picking at the front of his chaps after, but Gabe did not notice.

 

He would save the date. Nine months after the Hanamura mission, the first time he had ever lied to Gabriel Reyes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : Hello, world!
>   * Since Gabriel refused to go away, I added a character tag for him
>   * _武神_ \- The kanji characters printed on Genji's armor, literally translating as "god of military arts" or "martial god". However, it is more properly a reference to "Bushin", a philosophy for seeking harmony and using martial arts to maintain peace. You only get one guess as to what translation Gabriel was thinking of.
>   * tfw you go to post a chapter, find out there's a new comic, read it, but your nonsense still works yaaay
>   * Dear Blizzard, for Christmas in my stocking I would like a Blackwatch McCree skin, thanks
> 



	7. Genji

 

If he had to pick just one thing to remember, it would be the pendant cutting into his bare skin. Thick, lazy flickers of cicada shadows danced through the light coming in around their feet. He kissed her neck, and her breath channeled under his lips, making brief, sticky departures from her mouth as he swallowed against her. Her pulse chirped beneath his fingertip, a keen of greed playing at his leisure. She knifed her fingers through his hair when he tried to needle her throat strings with his canine. The necklace scratched a yoke into his chest. The feathery white cotton of her blouse caught in his fingers, her shoulderblades knocking into the wall. Their cage answered with a bronze ring.

 

“ _Bwong_ ~” he imitated as he nudged her collar off her shoulder, and she could not stop laughing. It became kind of obscene. She covered one side of her face with her hand like it would help, like a grin no one could see was meaningless, like he would not notice just one dark eye rising skyward with a misty shine. He kissed the thorns winding over her exposed shoulder cap, touching the pink of his tongue to bitter vines. She lifted her knee, knotting her heel around the back of his leg. When he started hunting the vee of her golden chain, her fingers clipped the curves of his ear, and he lost his breath against her skin. It was her but it was the humidity too, the saline ribbing his eyelids, the napping quiet of everything but insects, their conjoined panting within embroidered metal.

 

They both heard the clatter of expensive shoes across the pine walkways. Genji met her eyes, spitting out her pendant.

 

Before that she had been sitting on a polished bench at a blank table, listening to a conversation one room over. Two men in suits and warm, confident voices chatted in a golden lounge past an open doorway, while the girl listened and was not heard, same as Hanzo who sat across from her. Genji was outside the open window behind her, hunkered behind a white azalea with his fingertips tensed on the dirt and his knees bent up in a bunny-like crouch. He was waiting for the bodyguard in front of him to shuffle off on another loop of his patrol.

 

Sunlight broke across the cloudless, muggy castle, and Genji pawed sweat off his brow before it could sink down his nose. He heard a beep from a third room in the meeting area ouroboros, and the creak of floorboards as his brother sat up and went to retrieve a couple cups of iced tea. Genji wiped soil onto the azalea petals, and tipped his head back to mimic a bird whistle. Sayuki leaned outside, her pastel purple fingernails rippling across the windowsill. Genji saluted her from below, and detangled himself from the azalea in time to catch the wispy leg she thrust onto the lawn.

 

He helped her down into recline against his arms, and scrambled off with her as the bodyguard’s pointy shouldered tower made its return. Sayuki knocked her cat-eye sunglasses down from her forehead for the journey. Genji plotted a course as far as the dragon bell, and stopped there with his back to it, facing the purple core of Fuji and the sea of skyscrapers underneath the castle walls. Bullet trains glittered neon across raised tracks. Sayuki pecked her lips to his cheek.

 

“I have an idea,” he volunteered, and draped her onto her stilettos. He dove to his belly and slithered under the bell rim.

 

“I can’t go down there,” she sighed. “My clothes will get all dirty, Dad will pitch a fit.” Genji pulled his black shirt from his back and spread it out under the edge of the bell. Sayuki clucked her tongue, but wriggled through over the protective film of his clothing, grinning as she stood up. “Pretty clever,” she whistled.

 

“You look really nice,” he answered. Sayuki nudged her sunglasses back over her hair. Daylight flushed up her tight navy dress pants and the lace crosses of her heels. Three chains hung from her white blouse: two short necklaces off her throat, and a long pendant cord supporting a golden dragon emblem. The pendant came to rest at the part of her ribcage when she straightened.

 

“Mom helped me pick it out. Thought it looks like I mean business,” she mused, stippling the reptilian coil. “A real professional, right?” she asked Genji as she pulled the bare-chested Shimada against her by his wrist.

 

“Bet he liked that.” Genji ran his hand over her dragon talisman. “Was it very boring?” He burrowed his nose into the ebony hair below the wing of her sunglasses, breathing in the crisp, expensive amber and roses.

 

“You would know.” Sayuki made rosettes between his shoulders, angling her fingertips to nip him with her nails. “You must have been listening under that window a while.” He played with the tail-ends of her hair. “What did you think? It’s amazing your family got in good with Talon before mine.”

 

“I don’t have an opinion.”

 

“You just don’t want to share it. And I,” She soothed her fingers to the back of his neck only to grip it, coaxing his face up. “Do not quite understand your reasoning. It is all…” Her brown eyes swept to the side, wind stirring under the bell rim to pick at her hair. “…the color of business.” She considered Genji, but all she got back was a coy gray blink. “Hanzo gets it,” she prodded.

 

“You can go be his great wife whenever your father gets around to declaring it.” Cicadas rattled in the bellhouse rafters as Genji caressed the hips of the girl from Tokyo. “But Brother has to ask me for permission…”

 

“For what?”

 

“I don’t know.” He kissed her lips. “Fathering children.” Her mouth curved against his. He studied her ruby lipstick by touch and taste. Caramel and oranges, a heartbeat just below the surface.

 

“Are you sure you’re not going to be distracted by anyone else by then? Probably multiple people.” She dabbed her tongue against his upper lip, and he opened his mouth, tilting his head to dive into her. His brain sizzled in a pan of caramel, baked in the amplified Summer beneath the bell. Their arms made a lock around each other, and the pendant bit into his chest for the first time.

 

Sayuki liked to close her eyes when they kissed. Genji watched the movement under her eyelids, dreams of somewhere else. “You are so warm,” she whined in the moist gap between their mouths. She pushed her cheek up into his and he smirked, snuggling back.

 

Sayuki’s voice had time to recover. “I could convince Dad to pick you anyway. Hanzo might mean splitting things between here and Tokyo, it is not like he is going to give up ancestry for prosperity. But you I could keep in the city. With Talon and the rest, there is a lot going on, but I can inform you. It’s not like I get to listen to these meetings for myself.”

 

Genji sighed over her shoulder. “Hey,” Sayuki chirped. “Did you decide what universities you are going to apply for?” He dropped his head back, groaning this time.

 

“You should marry my father if you insist on mothering me. There has been a vacancy for a few years.”

 

“Yeah?” She tapped her chin with one finger. “He’s not that old.” Genji snarled her into his arms, squeezing her tight to him as he laughed. “I’m just trying to make sure you know what the future looks like before it gets here, okay?” she chuckled back. “That is what I am supposed to do. Everything that happens here, there is even more of it in the city.”

 

“You and my brother are going to get along really well,” Genji decided as he pressed into the chains and the girl, kissing her cheekbones, drawing his fingers around the sides of her belly.

 

Eventually hard shoes stormed into the bell garden and the cicadas went quiet. Genji grabbed his shirt off the floor while Sayuki buttoned hers. He started bracing his feet up on the wall of the bell, but Sayuki squeaked panic and he glanced down, noticing her heels. They slammed back together so he could disrobe her feet. He crammed the stiletto straps in his mouth and both of them framed their bodies against the bell metal, using the tension of the curve against palms and soles to suspend themselves. Security stampeded past.

 

Genji started snickering, only to pick up a second, more deliberate click of well-kept feet. A shadow invaded the sunlight circling the bell. _Hanzo_ , Genji mouthed at Sayuki through the heels. The lone specter prowled the fringes of their hiding place as they held their breaths.

 

His ears popped, and Sayuki’s eyes were nearly all whites as thunder yawned up right outside the bell, ignoring the blue sky, sonorous as a hundred maneaters. The primordial, roaring wave clapped into the side of the bell, jangling it on its thick rope tether like a top, and filling the interior with a forlorn _bong_. Genji tumbled off with a yelp. Sayuki fixed herself gecko-like through the reverberations, professionally dressed arms and legs trembling.

 

He cowered under the weight of history’s warnings till the last tingle of bell-song departed. He started crawling for the opening under the bronze lip, but Sayuki kicked him in the rump. He twisted around and she stuck her hand out at his face. He leaned up and spit out her shoes into her palm. With his tongue freed, he could speak his mind. “You asshole!” he shouted at the bellringer.

 

Genji crawled out and reared onto his knees quick as a little green-hooded cobra.

 

Before him stood a tall, refined figure gently shaking out his wrist, other arm hanging a tan blazer over the shoulder of his tailored shirt like a prep schooler just out of tutoring. He arched a trimmed eyebrow at Genji and smiled. “Father,” Genji gurgled. Sayuki gasped behind him.

 

“Hello Genji,” the elder Shimada replied mildly. “Hot out, is it?”

 

Genji’s eyes snapped to the black t-shirt lopped over his own shoulder. He laughed overly loud and found his feet, rubbing the back of his head.

 

“How did you know where I was...?”

 

His father looked at the dragon bell, smile softening. Sunlight cut a fine golden imprint around his head and shoulders, brought out the metallic edge of his tie.

 

“Memory.”

 

Genji’s forehead wrinkled. A finger poked at his brow. “Be careful. You’ll grow old.”

 

“You first,” Genji challenged, flicking his hand over his green spikes to make sure the touch had not mussed any out of alignment. Father sighed, and cleared his throat.

 

“I would like you to go to the artist and support your brother. He just left for his final session.”

 

“Of course.”

 

“Mr. Yanai went shopping. He left a car out front for Sayuki.”

 

“Great! I will let her know if I see her!”

 

“Thank you.” Mr. Shimada patted Genji’s shoulder, and he had manicured nails, but callouses underneath.

 

Genji watched his father depart, listened till his regal footsteps faded, and puddled down one knee at a time to the floor. He stuck his arm under the lip of the bell, performed a beckoning waggle, and dropped his shirt into position. He assumed a nearly fetal bow while Sayuki let herself out. She put one foot on his back to get her heels on.

 

“Your dad is so nice,” she wondered. She pulled a tab of make-up remover from her pocket and evaporated the lipstick prints from his mouth. Genji noticed her peering at the wooden bell striker tied securely in the rafters while she worked. “Why does he let you get away with everything?”

 

“I don’t know.” He rubbed his chest and looked down at the march of red chain prints in his skin. “He said there is a car for you--”

 

“No. Help me escape some other way,” Sayuki commanded as she adjusted her necklaces and drew up her blouse collar to cover the pink welts.

 

“Why?”

 

“I want to see Hanzo’s tattoo!”

 

He directed Sayuki to one of the secret routes off the estate, taking the broad front gate himself after he changed into a new set of clothing. He strolled right past the Yanai men and their car, immune to accusations of involvement with their fare’s disappearance. The meeting spot was under the dangling noodles and hungry fangs of Rikimaru. Genji arrived first, and snuck out a bowl of ramen which he ate on the walk as expertly as he could. Sayuki tolerated him strutting around with it a little while, but as soon as she spotted an available bench beside a playground demanded he sit down and finish there.

 

Every street corner had a flush green sakura, the sunlight poured warm as tea down his back, and his belly was very full. He leaned back and squinted at the kids zipping down plastic candy-colored slides and spinning circles on pink tires. Sayuki asked him if he was dozing off, to which he shook his head and closed his eyes.

 

“Maybe you should wait for him to show it to you,” he sniffed after she woke him up with a snap to the forehead. “He is a giant baby when it comes to the sessions.” Sayuki wrapped both her arms around one of his and clowned at physically dragging him off the bench. Some of the kids noticed, giggled, and it was infectious. Genji stood up grinning.

 

“You said it is only a sleeve, right? He should have gotten his back done.”

 

“You only want it to match yours.”

 

Sayuki walked out ahead of him and gave him a turn, the thin white cloth of her blouse surprisingly resilient to the ink staining the flesh below. The design crept onto her shoulders by giving thorns to flowers that did not have them in nature. Genji could only pick out the dreams of color below the surface because he had already seen all the tigers and red-eyed, knife-wielding maids.

 

“You might be right. Maybe I can get you to do it instead.” She hooked an arm at his waist as they passed the curtained eyes of an apartment complex. “If you are scared of the pain, you can use my artist. He is really sensitive, and he’s omnic, so--”

 

“You let a robot do your tattoo?” Genji rolled his head to one side, popping his neck, eyes half-lidded. “I will have to look again, see if it made any mistakes.

 

“Mistakes?” Sayuki pursed her lips.

 

“Mistakes are what make it beautiful.” He peered up into the blue sky, the birds exchanging apartment roofs with each other. “If a machine just prints a pattern, there won’t be any. You better not tell Hanzo, he’ll think you are a fake.”

 

Sayuki’s red lips hung open at him. She was so rarely surprised.

 

“You should come to Tokyo more,” she countered. He fired an inquiring pout at her, and she made a photo frame around it with her fingers. “You need a bigger worldview. Have you ever met an omnic?” He shoved his hands in his pockets.

 

“There’s one at the arcade sometimes. It wears shitty clothes, stuff with ads and logos, like it got them all for free.”

 

“Maybe it did. Not a lot of people will hire them, so they can’t just go out and buy designer.” She scrutinized the gray and white print clinging to his hips and his hands.

 

“Didn’t they cause a war or something?” Genji muttered. Sayuki rolled her eyes.

 

“They’re still at it sometimes.”

 

“So why would you let one do your tattoo?” He tapped open one of the apartment gates. “We have arrived,” he droned as Sayuki opened her mouth. She sighed. He rang the doorbell and one of the Shimada security men let them in. Two of the suits were sitting in the artist’s living room, sending texts on their phones. Genji pulled Sayuki down the hall to a red door that might have coded as bedroom in any other domicile.

 

In this apartment it led to a waiting room, a boxy white kiln with another door to the artist's theater at the end. There were chairs and holoscreens scattered around the walls, but he and Sayuki crammed up to the theater door, which had a small window at the top.

 

Hanzo was stretched out on a tablet of plastic-wrapped blue padding, black hair spreading like roots over a minimal pillow. The artist was an old man whose sagging skin was nigh unrecognizable besides as a canvas for flowers and demons. He knelt next to Hanzo’s left arm and jabbed a titanium stick of navy dye into it. Other needles and rods sat behind the misty screen of an autoclave affixed to the wall. Black-framed photographs of the artist’s work hung from much of the remaining space. Bar lights hanging from the ceiling erased all shadow but the one of the artist over his creation.

 

A shelf full of design books packed into the far corner. A screen to one side of that was blotted with different shades of ink, a garden of splattered pots beneath it, but no such mess was tolerated around the slab where Hanzo lay. The heir’s eyes were closed.

 

“Where is the giant baby I was promised?” Sayuki complained. “He looks like he’s asleep.”

 

“You can’t tell? Look at his face.” Genji propped his fingertips against the bottom of the window.

 

“I don’t see anything. The art is nice. I guess I can’t expect an unconventional design from a Shimada.” She dug her finger down Genji’s vertebra, raising the hair on the back of his neck. “I will message you my artist’s number. Don’t delete it!” She took his hand in hers, massaging his fingers and holding them to her cheek. Genji glanced at the red door behind them, but security had yet to check in. Sayuki let him go and flipped her hand through her hair. “You loved his work before you knew he was a robot,” she chided.

 

Genji hung his head. Past the window, the artist patted Hanzo’s unmarked shoulder and announced a curt “Break time!” He shuffled off through a small door on the side, and a baseball game announcer immediately brayed through the doorway. Hanzo opened his eyes to the cracked ceiling and sterile lights above him.

 

“Genji,” he called, and the pair of them shrank away from the door.

 

“See you later,” Sayuki snickered, kissing Genji’s cheek, and erasing the evidence with her make-up remover.

 

“Bye…” He watched her go, scratching his elbow. It probably was not her. It was the room, this place, like being trapped in a sterling shoebox. He let himself through to the theater, and the artifacts everywhere made it the less uneasy scene.

 

And Hanzo was there, trapped by a rare lack of authority. His older brother’s eyes studied him expectantly. “It’s really cool,” Genji declared earnestly, sitting down cross-legged by Hanzo’s right arm and leaning forward. “How’d he get Father’s color in the lightning so exact? Though, wouldn’t Father prefer to be seen as the sun?” He stuck his tongue out. Hanzo huffed, indifferent to the critique. Genji folded his right arm to his chest, rubbing the back of his wrist. “What am I supposed to be?”

 

“A blade of grass lost in the wind, with no control over where it goes,” Hanzo suggested. Genji unfurled one of his crossed legs to kick him in his unembellished arm. Hanzo growled and sat up, and the artist roared in over both of them.

 

“Knock it off dumbasses! Do not ruin my work!” He flattened Hanzo back onto the slab, pointed at Genji with a finger like a knotted stick. “Behave or leave.” Genji withdrew his legs and sat steadfast and quiet by his brother’s side. Hanzo checked him up and down, then shut his eyes again. The artist picked up a new rod and thick, brush-like needle from the autoclave, stringing on drops of dye. They resembled little blue tears till the moment they were stabbed into Hanzo, becoming the dark root of each koi scale along the body of his dragon. The finished parts haunted Genji’s eye even after he looked away, a ribbon of diamond persisting through storms.

 

And there were mistakes: gold bleeding out of the lightning lines, or sketchy masses of whirling clouds that slammed into each other. Genji fetched one of the books of prospective designs from the shelf. He was surprised to find the pages were paper, and turned the first couple sheets back and forth, rubbing the grain into his fingertips. He stuck the book under Hanzo’s hand, and the elder brother tilted his head over. His lips punched up nothing but stoicism, but after Genji manipulated his fingers around one of the page corners, they twitched into the rare material and his brow creased.

 

Genji returned to rifling through designs till he noticed the needle approaching Hanzo’s inner elbow. He put the book down and took Hanzo’s hand. Hanzo laid very still, eyes resolutely closed, but the corners of his eyelids twitched. Genji exhaled as the needle finally thrust off to new territory, and this made Hanzo chuckle, and both brothers laughed till the artist told them to shut up.

 

A toe prodded Genji’s folded legs.

 

“Okay, old man…” he yawned, dragging his arms out of their slack collapse in front of his body and stretching them over his head. He yawned again, and squeezed his eyes together a few times before he squinted up at the figure responsible for waking him.

 

“It is done,” Hanzo smirked. Still groggy, Genji nonetheless obliged the left arm with a look. It was mummified in white bandages. “Did you eat ramen before you came here?” Hanzo asked as Genji collected himself off the floor.

 

“Still so full,” Genji sighed. “Oh, I will tell them to bring the car--”

 

“I already did.”

 

Genji blinked, and looked around the theater for some role he could fulfill. The artist had taken a seat in the next room over, and it sounded like a different baseball program was playing. He spotted a shirt lying on the floor and balled it in his hand. He stuck himself under the shoulder of Hanzo’s bare right arm. “What are you doing?” his brother accused more than asked, all gravel and thunder.

 

“Like a hero,” Genji soothed, thinking of the distant robot Crisis. “From a war.” Hanzo allowed himself to be limped out to the car. A single raise of his dark head silenced any cheers from security over his bedraggled departure.

 

“No suits for a while, Master,” Tadao warned as he opened the back door for them. “Let it heal.”

 

“I know,” Hanzo grumbled as he sloughed off Genji onto the back cushion. He made Genji get the alcohol out of the cooler, and refused him any of the spoils, an order enforced by the two bodyguards sharing the car’s back compartment with them. The suits followed them to their rooms in the tower, where Genji could finally heel the door shut. Hanzo lumped onto his bed with arms fanned, and Genji sat on the side next to him.

 

Hanzo took a few deep breaths, and closed his eyes. “It hurts,” he grumped.

 

“You did it to yourself,” Genji noted.

 

“Did you bring that Yanai girl to the artist’s studio?”

 

“No.” Genji scrubbed the base of his palm against his ear. “She will be delighted to know you think so highly of her. Did you see the necklace she wore for you?”

 

“The what? This is beside the point. I hope you did nothing foolish after you kidnapped her from the meeting.”

 

“Just stole a few kisses.” Genji bounced his heels on the bed’s sideboard. “I didn’t have time for anything else.”

 

* * *

 

Smoke rose from sores in the earth and wreathed his legs. Panes of metal kept skittering off the kick of his toes as he moved, screeching nails down the concrete. Then he crested a hill, walked down, fell down most of it, and the color of the detritus in the air brightened, smoke into grainy fog.

 

Needed the world to stop snapping at him, roaring any time he turned his eyes away, striking him, screaming under his feet, popping like bones in his ears.

 

Among the stunted trees and shadows at the bottom of the hill, a flash of steel red popped out at his left. He stopped on the embankment, twitching his head at the red anomaly, waiting to see if it would move.

 

It stood still. _He_ launched, eating four strides of copper soil to reach the red panel and swing the sword through it. The top flew off, mineral microfilaments spinning away from the line of dismemberment. No special audio feedback, like a synth scream or a sloppy vomit of erupting coolant. The remaining piece of red metal did not move. He focused his visor: he had cut in half a red hexagon with a script he could not read on it. The bottom half was still pinned to a short utility pole at the trailhead of some kind of private establishment, perimeter fence no more than glitter in the dirt.

 

He lowered his sword-- startled at the movement of the blade, and traced its fanged black stalk to the hilt lodged in his armored hand. His fingers convulsed, each its own hard-shelled insect, but none told him anything more than that the sword had always been with him, and that everything in this world was sharp and established only by how much force it used on him.

 

His breath simulation disarmed him for a few seconds, synthesizer racing to keep up. Sounded like a crow with its beak rusted shut. Then the sword drooped, and he stepped over the ruined fence.

 

His feet patted into gray sand, a planet that rippled around his intrusion and clung to the prints he left behind. Explosions broke miles behind him, working spasms out of his back. At his side the dirt flat whispered constantly. His head shifted right to investigate: it was the point of his sword, writing a lifeless riverbed in the sand. Looking at it, he figured out how to stretch open his fingers, and the sword fell. He resumed the fist on a ghost, faceplate hanging at the reassuring forward plod of his feet.

 

Green reflected off the sand, off his white armor. He dialed off his indicator lights, and the sickening color passed. He traveled the earth as an unsteady silhouette, but the ground around him only became brighter. Shadows flew in to either side, writing crescent wings in and out of definition. Long forebodies stretched from each phantom, snake heads to go with clipped moon wings.

 

His visor tipped up from the earth, visual feed automatically assigning target distances. Birds with thin necks and long curving bills crossed the sand with him. Their black throats worked in muted alarm, two-note yelps back and forth between friends. Skeletal legs floated elongate under the small white fans of their tails, and their snowy wings flashed bloody veins up to the bone, flapping char feather tips like a migration of battle standards. They turned in gentle escape to the colorless dawn prickling through the horizon.

 

Genji came to a halt, only movement the dark ribbon trailing from his helmet on a playful wind. He watched the white egg of the sun as it brimmed over the flat scrub and sand. East. If he headed east… His synthesizer scratched a name in the empty air. The birds disappeared into the light. He followed them. Where the sun hugged the ground, he noticed a distant tower rising from the sand, stabbing into it. He reached behind his head at the tall scabbard on his back, but it was empty.

 

The visor feed blurred. He turned around, and his abandoned sword sharpened into view. Genji returned to collect it. His eyes stuttered over the path he had left behind: a low mountain cresting red from the earth, so much smoke pluming over the other side it was still night there. Fire beat noxious orange pillars against the bellies of soot clouds, reflecting on the sword. He picked up his weapon, tracing the frame till he found a place where the edge still severed his fingers. Good enough: he sheathed the sword on his back.

 

As he resumed the trek he felt another bird around him, but could not find it in the sky. Plates of stone and metal began to crackle under his feet as he approached the tower in the east. Broken junctures protruded from the dirt, snagging his black toes. He clicked onto a bus-sized slab of rubble, worn red letters spelling out _O-M-N-I-C-A_ as he walked. Genji reached the _A_ and off the character’s peak a new shadow appeared:

 

Four wings, stuck in place, wingtips vibrating as the shade darkened. It was almost perfectly a butterfly in silhouette, two of the wings larger than the other pair. Genji looked up.

 

A blue lens narrowed its pupil aperture in his face. The body and wings were silver, the smaller wings were at the front, and the abdomen hunched forward like a bee. Suspending propellant whined invisibly from steely carapace bands. Genji spun out three stars between his fingers. The first sliced the wings off the left side. The drone screamed and fell into the sand cozied around the _A_ stencil. Its cargo-- a cheap prepaid phone unit with a white case --thumped down to its left. It tried to right itself with its remaining wings, monocular lens dilating neon as it screwed around in the dirt. Genji put the second shuriken into its eyelight and the drone jerked. It coiled up like a seashell, and went still.

 

He aimed the third star at the phone.

 

The phone rang, a pop excerpt from an artist old enough that the royalties were cheap. Genji held onto his star, zephyrs tugging his ribbon back and forth, muscle overcoat of his body rigid.

 

He dropped the weapon, picked up the phone. His fingers quivered against the back panel, infected by tactile memory of navigating apps open by teasing the plastic screen, and pressing the unit to his ear. But as he only held it, the phone flipped to an activated green call icon, and a wilted lily of a voice mixed into his audio stream.

 

“Hello, lost boy.”

 

He remained silent and very still, playing back the wave form of her voice over and over again. “I wish you hadn’t destroyed the drone,” she chuckled. “That’s going to attract official attention. I could hardly believe it when they explained what they wanted to borrow them for.” Genji smiled behind his faceplate, clicked on his visor and integument lights.

 

“Amari?” He took note of the dawn on his face, altered the synth tone to a tease. “Time to go swimming.” Just looking at the audio-only connection on the phone screen was pleasing, like finding a tomato in the desert.

 

“If only I were not on-mission.”

 

“Me too,” he remembered, and took a step over the inactive surveillance drone.

 

“Genji, I am going to ask that you do not move. Don’t take a step from that spot,” the phone piped up. He obeyed, shoulders rolling as he awaited explanation. Instead Amari asked him a question: “What mission are you on?”

 

“Hanzo.” He looked at the sun in the east, the lone tower lancing up its belly. While he chatted with the soldier, the sun was prying itself, dripping and blazing, from the spire’s grasp.

 

The phone did not reply for a while.

 

“Do you know why we fight the omnics?” Ana asked softly.

 

“Because Mr. Reyes told me to.”

 

She murmured something in Arabic, a lullaby.

 

“These days, we are mostly peacekeepers,” she resumed in English. The cyborg thought she sounded mournful. He loved the ring of her voice, it was like a missing texture in his life. “There is just one kind of situation we cannot ignore: the possibility that a god program has broken containment, and may be commandeering free-living omnics as its avatars. To be so enslaved is to be in pain, to live in confusion, and to become deadly to all those the program considers its enemies.”

 

“Did you find the program in the city?”

 

“No. I was told its origins may lay here, or perhaps further east in the desert.”

 

Genji searched the sandcastle of trash around him. Nothing there, except the tower.

 

“I am heading that way,” he hummed, brightening his visor as though Ana could make it out through the audio line. “I can call you if I see anything strange.” He twisted the phone side-to-side in his hand, the growing sunlight gleaming off its cheap screen. “If this receives out there.”

 

“Listen very carefully,” Ana ordered. “In the Crisis we used to interrogate omnics that had been freed from omnium A.I. control. They said the program felt just like their own thoughts. They were able to give complex justification for taking human lives, and sometimes it involved issues very personal to them.”

 

Genji walked east as Ana told him a story. His visor feed polarized as the sun squeezed higher in the sky.

 

The old soldier’s voice cut into her own legend, snapping in Captain’s tone: “I said don’t move. Don’t take another step closer.” Genji stopped, looking down at his feet as he pulled his black toes together, wavering where he stood.

 

“Okay…” he sighed, budging one of his toes under the parched gray soil.

 

“I need you to answer a question as honestly as you can.” Genji raised his head and stood straight like a student called on in class. He had no teacher to focus on, so he looked over the tower in front of him. Five stories tall, the roof a thicket of antennae and communications dishes. What he had taken for an art deco entry arch he now saw was the upright body of a decapod mechanical walker, its pointed legs embedded through the concrete face of the tower as high as the second floor. It had the shape of two hands trying to claw apart from each other. It did not move, and its jeweled turquoise thorax was caked with dust. None of the windows around it appeared intact, just hollow holes into lightless floors.

 

He could hear something whirring inside the tower like a fan. When he looked at the top again, he made out the singular blue points of drone eyes, four-winged bodies scavenging around the fingernail of the roof. “Do you believe you have been compromised by a god program?” Ana asked.

 

“Amari...” Genji took a few breaths, summed up with a laugh: “You know I am a man.” He rubbed his hand over his helmet crest, visor feed blurring.

 

“I know you are,” she cried back, laughing too. “I know you are,” she repeated, reassuring someone. “That’s why I wanted to talk with you first. I think this is all a big misunderstanding, so if you stay put, I’m sure I can sort it out on our end. Though, I may need to retire soon. I’ve had this unfortunate habit of thinking on the battlefield lately.” She mumbled the last part to herself: “You’re supposed to take your shots when you have them.”

 

“Is it a game?” Genji crouched, searching the tower windows for the wink of a gun muzzle.

 

“What?” Ana breathed out so shallow the word was barely more than static on the phone line.

 

“Like before. If I can reach you, I win.”

 

Another long silence from the phone.

 

“It’s not me you have to worry about,” Ana struggled into her mic finally. The blue-eyed drones took off from the tower apex, floating into the sky as if pulled by strings. “I was only requested to play support, and they just figured me out.” The phone crackled. "Don’t trust your first instinct on this one.”

 

“I think I can reach you this time.” He rested his hand on his wakizashi’s hilt.

 

“I’m sorry, my friend.” The call terminated in a red screen. Genji laid the phone down in the sand without taking his eyes from the tower.

 

Ana did not pursue her usual opening salvo. He was sure that when he pushed off the sand, she would snap his ankles in the delay from the uneven terrain. But his body streaked forward in pale silence, unpestered by rifle beads. Maybe she did need to retire. With an electric green pulse sparking from the slender balusters of his lower legs, Genji leaped to a second story window. He sailed through without even rasping the frame.

 

And fell. There was no second floor under him. The entire tower interior had been chewed out. He twisted and caught the windowsill in his hand, cracking the plasmetal lip as he dangled on the wall.

 

Crumbs of floor partitions stuck in the corners of the tower frame. Warped circles of light followed the peg tips of the walker’s legs through the wall, dappling the basement. The bottom of the tower was covered in omnic parts. Everything valuable had been looted, but there were handless arms, headless throats, and breastplates scooped empty like crab shells. The whirring he had heard before was above now, at the festooned roof. Genji pulled himself back into the window frame, squatting beside the walker’s inert head module.

 

He jumped to a third floor window, climbing the wall from there to the roof while the tower creaked uneasily beneath him. As he came over the top he leveled his short sword in front of his chest, crouch-walking the perimeter of the tower antennae. Ana was not there. Off the eastern parapet he could see the sun fully disgorged from the horizon, its white glare covering every place but where he stood. Genji studied the rooftop concrete: it was blanketed in a blurry shadow, he could make out the wings of a bird.

 

Familiar whirring over his head. Pieces of the sky that did not make sense. He got as far as nailing a v-shaped outline when the roof exploded under his feet, tossing him upside-down on a volcanic puff of air pressure, leg armor cracking. The cloud of fire and debris as he fell back down through the dismembered tower was secondary to the impact force as another shell hit the west wall, smashing him into the other side. His feet twitched to grip the vertical sheer, but it tipped over. The top level of the tower slumped inward.

 

He smacked into one of the decapod walker’s legs, and wrapped both hands around it. Gossamer feelers protruded from the machine’s toe, adhering to his arms by reflex action. The tower began caving in and Genji was trying to kick himself apart from the dormant sensory apparatus. Another rocket hit and the decapod teetered forward, bulldozing through the tower’s back wall, its limp arms plunging Genji into a hill of gravel.

 

Genji squirmed under the walker’s toe. Rocket impacts shifted it off his body, carcass rolling over in the pond of hard sand. He flipped onto his belly and crawled through a visor feed of nothing but dirt, screaming uselessly when thunderclaps blasted all sides of the refuse. Chips of stone screeched furrows into his muscle fiber when he moved, the weight of the grave should have broken his back. He snaked from gravel to dune, invertebrate, sharp noises propelling him forth.

 

The unlikely white worm’s fingers protruded into the air long after the last explosion had fired sand to glass behind him. He scrambled his feet to the ground, lunged down-slope a couple meters, then fell on his face and tumbled the rest of the way. A black streak tattooed his trail to the bottom of the dune.

 

“Amari…!” his synthesizer ground out, pitch cracking on the end, unable to maintain a single coherent expression to fit that name.

 

His body started shaking, a disobedient shell. _Stop, stop_. He calmed himself down by tipping his chin to his chest and assessing his mechanical damage. His helmet ribbon was tangled all around his torso and he had to draw onto his knees to pick it off. “Amari,” he moaned again as he stood up. His left leg’s armor was strung together in jagged fragments, severed muscle cords making frilly punctures in the front and sides. The right leg surface resembled a pane of glass punched in by a baseball, with streaks of oily residue clinging to the shatter lines.

 

He made a small circle over the desert. The left leg limped. His system fed in alerts about the stabilized damage, but he could not detect pain. “Can’t feel anything,” he complained, when calling her name did not summon Amari from the dunes. She still never answered.

 

Genji lurched in one direction for a while, head drooping, visor applying target overlays to the occasional large rock in the sand. The color of the ground changed, boiling into umber around the flayed remains of his toes. Plateaus of martian stone swelled out of the crimson soil. He still expected fire and smoke at his back, but he looked and it was cool gray sand. At a loss for better markers, Genji threw himself back at the sun, hunting the eastern dawn across red canyons and lifeless flats of earth.

 

* * *

 

One day, he began crushing sprouts and weeds under his feet. Then his ankle stuck into shallow water, a spasm of minnows contracting away. He kept limping, glass and metal crinkling around his submerged legs, like the mission city without its hellfire. A dark and bloated island bobbed in front of his visor just was the water reached his chin. Genji turned to watch the bulbous, pirouetting figure: a dead cow, gleams of sunlight off its ribs, head sunk but horns puffed out callous-like through the water surface. He peered at the dawn on the other side of the river, and back at the cow as it stuck in a cloud of grasses on the bank.

 

He backed out to the western shore, kicking a can off his ankle. He moved downstream, and around the next bend a couple boys were bathing in the water. They saw him and screamed, running off.

 

Every day the sun rose at him from the other side of the river. At night, barges tricked him into seeing fallen stars. Lanterns swung on the prows of fishing canoes, round and white like little moons. No more corpses dotted the waterway, but the surface was often waxy and iridescent, and decorated with crumpled pieces of garbage. Once he sat down on the foundation of a broken bridge, watching sloops pull out net after net of tumorous gray tilapia.

 

Any conversation he overheard he could not understand. Sometimes he could pick out single terms he had heard off Amari’s lips, but he had never asked her what they meant. He avoided the obvious cities, winding through their outer ditches till he returned to the riverbank on their other cheek.

 

But there was a city that snuck up on him. Genji saw a house in the distance reflecting roof to doorstep in the river. Through a coat of smog, he pieced together other buildings in the same condition, foundations resting in sewage of varying depths. The river did not run just one course, but claimed its banks, and fanned out to meet the horizon. Interspersed in the water were rooftops, abandoned cars, engineered trees with yellow leaves. He found a truck etched with rust that had actual tires under its wheel hubs. Clouds of distorted, superheated pollution weaved over the streets. In this city, omnics looked through the bug screens of abandoned porch stoops, or poked around in the roads, sticking their hands in the water to collect chunks of trash.

 

Genji drew his sword the first couple times he saw one, but they kept running away and he could not keep up. One morning he was looking at his fingers as the sun came up, and discovering they were brown with dirt. He bent as the machines did, plunging his hand into the ashen water. But the dirt had been baked in, there were little stones embedded in cuts on his fingertips. Past the outline of his hand, he noticed the dawn rippling around his ankles. Genji turned east.

 

He got one step. One step, and on the next his ankle hit a submerged line of serrate wire, and as he tripped it tangled through the broken armor at his shin and embedded in the disrepair. Titanium barbs fished into support structures and the world started snapping and biting into him and Genji thrashed on his side, shiny and silent as a beached fish. He kicked the wire till it broke and climbed from the shadow of a jet tail sunk in the riverbed, fleeing west.

 

He had long understood that west was a flat golden abyss. He had made it close enough to the ocean that the land rolled into beachside dunes, but they hung inert around him. It did not hurt to touch them. When he escaped far enough from the machine city, the only sound was the gentle exhalation of the waves on a shore he could not see. Genji sat down in the shade of the sand. He toyed with the remnant of wire around his leg for a while, but it only seemed to come closer to cutting his foot off.

 

The cyborg’s silver faceplate ticked at the sand, but it made no sound. He tried working his synthesizer, but all that came out was a kind of buzz and click, a whine like a phone call submerged in interference. His back tightened, chest working silently. Had he been damaged somewhere and missed the diagnostic until now? Reminded himself of a drone, a little butterfly that became a wasp, or a Bastion unit screaming monotones as it shot at him. He touched his chrome collar, up the patchwork of black armor to the two thick cords supporting his head and the hexagonal pad between them. Tried to figure out if it was intact, but he did not know what intact felt like. His fingertips reported nothing to him except the relative firmness of each component.

 

He spoke again, the only word he could think of: “Hanzo.”

 

Genji turned his head sharply, recalculating the courtyard of dunes. Waited for someone to come out from behind one, or for a noise to break the world again. When nothing happened, he leaned back into the sand. He tried to put his arm around it, but it just ran out through his grip. He laid down on his side and tried again, curling into the soft, still earth. It had weight: if he pressed into it, it almost felt human.

 

* * *

 

Shaded blue koi scales dripped across his visor, a ribbon of diamond persisting in a golden storm. The feed blurred. Sand trickled over the visor well, pouring restlessly down the hillside. Genji pulled his blanket of earth closer to his chest, turning his head back to try and shake off the weight of the kiss to his face, looking into the sky.

 

The atmosphere was pocked with lines of smoke and the arguments of carrion birds. His visor clarified the string of scales: undulating gray-brown bands like the belly of an oversized earthworm, and right as he focused on it the end passed as a bloody stump, leaving a streak on the visor pane. The dune cracked as something heavy struck the other side, and Genji oozed out onto the naked ground, synthesizer summoning a haggard pant as he waited for a rocket strike.

 

Another muffled thump shook the sand on his side of the dune, not as loud as the first. He rolled his head to the side and saw a fragment of what might have been a dome, or another terraced chunk of architecture. A flight of broken rods thunked into the dune’s flank like spears. Pebbles rattled across his helmet as he staggered to his feet. He turned, leaves of fire rolling out of the air to char on the sand around his feet. To the east he saw roses reaching for the sky, worshipped by the steam of the drowned omnic city. Overwatch blue and orange ships, and the occasional black eagle, coasted over decrepit rooftops.

 

And the sun came up through all of it, littering a rare palette of clouds in the east with purple and orange. Individual rays swept under the cumulus to streak pink across the desert. Sunlight caught the gold in the scales of a bleeding snake collapsed in front of Genji, and lined the shoulders and crown of a figure floating in front of him. A weathered chrome head with chips of surface silver eroded from its mouth seam and fixtures turned toward him. Nine blue lights glowed above the lilting black slots of its eyes. Nine etched orbs cycled around its neck. It was leaning away from a shard of debris, pulling back its arm to show a hand coated in blood and sand, a snake’s tail arrested in its metal fingers. It was not touching the ground, it looked to be sitting on the wind, with its legs crossed.

 

Liquid dirt streamed off Genji’s joints, quiet and translucent at first, then coarse and fast as he reached behind his back and drew his sword. He stepped over the snake with a leg coated in barbed wire and black coolant, ticking his visor up and down the floating machine as he lifted the sword even with his shoulders. Nothing imbued the sword with fire, the blade flashed dully in the rising sun, and he nearly lost his balance as he brought his other leg forward.

 

“Are you the god program?”

 

The machine’s head tipped to one side with a networked flexion of the shiny, skinless tendon rods composing its neck.

 

“Do you intend to kill me?” it asked, raising its golden chin at the sword making uneven circles at its chest.

 

“You are dangerous. I am supposed to.” Genji mustered his better foot tighter beneath his body, steadying himself. The omnic’s head bowed.

 

Then it floated away from him.

 

Genji’s visor ducked at the omnic’s fleeing shadow. He had not realized the hover was an actual method of locomotion. His wired foot trembled forward, found his weight in the sand, then he lurched after the robot.

 

It peeked at him over its shoulder. Its flight was far from swift. After a few stumbling paces with his sword wavering down for balance, Genji fired the green pulse off his lower legs just as the omnic was checking his position again. Something sparked and burnt around his support struts, but it did not matter because he collided with the omnic and flattened it to the desert under him. He stuck the tip of his sword in the ground so he could prop himself up.

 

He nailed a bleeding foot to the lower spine fuselage, standing up on the robot. After a few seconds estimating if he would fall over or not, he pulled his sword out the ground and notched it at the center of the back, just under the fusion of the torso chassis. The omnic twitched as the blade nudged into its cables, and Genji’s green visor blazed as he regarded his surroundings.

 

No one from the organization came out to congratulate him. He glanced at the ships over the city to the east, but none of them turned. His captive sighed, relaxing its fingers across the sand, tucking its head to one side. Only it saw something then that prompted a gasp from its dulcet synthesizer, and its weathered body twisted under his foot, arm stretching toward the shadow of the dune. Genji followed the strain of its fingers, and they were reaching for the snake he had left behind, now rolled belly-up.

 

“Will you let me save her life?” The omnic lifted its head at him, voice rich and direct. Genji lacked a good reference point for the question, which was not a command, or a scream, or a curse. He looked at the omnic’s far hand, spattered with blood and still shielding the snake’s tail. Pulling his sword and foot off, he tilted his head curiously. The omnic did not start floating again, but crawled over to the snake and picked it up, bringing the limp coils to its chassis.

 

He hobbled up behind the robot to see what it was doing, sword bobbing at hip level. As the omnic unfurled its fingers and held the two scaled halves close, a pocket of cold rocked through Genji’s empty abdomen.

 

“You should leave it alone,” he stammered. The omnic did not answer, but dispensed one of the orbs that ringed its neck to the exact center of the broken creature. Threads of golden light forged between machine and snake, no different from the fires at their backs or the sun blooming over the dunes. Genji chucked his sword against the omnic’s shoulder. Wind chimes laughed through his audio feed as the snake’s tail shrunk, disintegrated, and reformed with a brief weave of jewel red gutstrings before the scales grew over it.

 

The snake reared up as fast as it knit together, coiling smartly in the omnic’s palms. The omnic withdrew the orb to its collective, shoulders drooping in a contented sigh, Genji’s blade squeaking on the metal. A spade head curved out of the serpent’s bodily pile with a hiss, and it launched the pink of its mouth fruitlessly at the nearest metal fingertip, then hit the silver of the robot’s chassis several times till it left kisses of blood and a fang stuck in the surface. The omnic lowered it to the ground, and it looped away across the sand, another orb sent after it. The golden tether held till the snake wound out of sight past the dune.

 

“Thank you,” the omnic said to Genji, remaining on its knees in front of him. Genji reached down to grab the tooth from its chest, but the artifact was gone, along with the touches of red.

 

“I don’t--” Genji blinked his visor helplessly, locking his sword tip to the omnic’s spinal column again. Its blue-lit faceplate tilted at him.

 

“Would you like me to heal your legs first?”

 

Genji heard a click of cylinders and pistons, but it was above him instead of under his sword. Restraining the omnic’s shoulder, he looked up. Dangling off the edge of the dune was a purple-eyed drone with a matte brown carapace over its copter wings, and dangling manipulators off its abdomen that reminded him of a giant mosquito.

 

“Amari!” he called to the surveillance unit, visor flashing hopefully. The drone’s pupil shrank to a point, he could hear the little gears constricting the aperture. It buzzed off east, toward the sun and the city. As Genji looked after it, he noticed two of the black ships crackling their engines and turning off the ruins. They paired up on the outskirts, darts above the reflecting water, and coasted into the desert.

 

Their outlines faded from the sky, and only the shadows stayed, pulsing over the earth toward him.

 

He saw muzzle flashes in the emptied atmosphere.

 

A line of bullets chopped at his feet, grading upward, knocking a hole in his sword hand, chipping off one of the white wings cresting his helmet. The sound of the ship guns firing came only a second after, nearly lost among the ruffles of out-of-range bullets striking the dirt. Genji’s visor light sank off. He picked up the katana knocked from his hand and sheathed it.

 

“We need to escape,” the omnic told him. “Or all will be lost.” He ignored the machine, turning around and taking out his wakizashi. As the ships rolled out the next waves of bullets, he caught the start of the assault on the blade, aiming it back at the muzzle flashes. The gun ports exploded just as the last few bullets ripped across the sword and through Genji’s sides. The ships wavered into view, conferencing together as their undersides smoked. He got his short sword back in the scabbard, then he fell backwards.

 

The omnic’s faceplate popped into view above his visor, leaning over him. “May I heal you?” it asked.

 

“Don’t touch me.” He rolled onto his side and got back up, leaking green and black down his legs. The omnic was seated on air again. As soon as Genji stopped swaying, it puttered away from him around the side of the dune, following the tracks of the snake. Genji snarled, limping after it.

 

Too slow, now. He could barely keep up, but the damn thing kept stopping and _waiting for him_ , then zipping off as soon as he got in range. When his chest tried a gasping simulation, he could hear the plastic bag wheeze of its internal machinations. The omnic did not know about the shuriken in his arm. But he would catch it, for his own sake.

 

The earth obeyed him at first: treacherous sand paved into hard clay, he could find a grip more easily even if his toes were splitting apart. He flinched as a couple shadows crossed his head, but they were only birds, white gulls. “She said the god program hides in the desert,” he bellowed at the omnic. The ground began to incline, and he fell to his knees. The omnic stopped a couple meters away, watching him till he groaned back up and resumed pursuit. At the top of the cliff he fell on his side, rolled onto his belly, black oil fanning around his chest. He reached up and secured a grip on the torn ankle of the omnic’s pants.

 

“This was the only thing I could think of,” the omnic said. It had nowhere further to go, and floated on the cliff point beside Genji, looking out beyond the earth. Below them lay the deep, violet ocean. There were buildings in the water, shadows of boats, everything dark and still while whitecaps rolled lazily overhead, wind picking up speed. “I apologize.” Genji looked up past tufts of wavy marsh grass at the omnic.

 

“This is a pretty bad hiding spot,” he agreed, before mushing his visor into the grass. “A ‘poor tactical choice’…” he mumbled into the greenery as the engines of the two ships came rumbling down on their heads.

 

“I will have to touch you now,” the omnic said over the mechanical circus. One of the ships floated in front of them, its nose and cannons a breath from the cliff edge. The other craft descended behind and began browning the grass with the heat off its jets.

 

Hands settled over Genji’s shoulders.

 

Bird feathers fanned over his back, sank past the bulk of his armor, and curled into warm fingers on skin. The joints crooked over his collar, silken fingertips pressed down his arms unevenly. Palms rested over his forehead as he sniffled, coached him forward as he whined, dropped him from the parapet as he screamed, callouses scraped across nerves he no longer owned, because mistakes were part of anything real. But this time the hands held on and others joined the flanks of his chest, supported his arms, lifted him from the ground. His fingers reached free of gashes and holes, his legs were sturdy, uninterrupted white beneath him. His chest was a sculpture of powerful muscle slit by measured vents like a fish, with a beating heart inside. Electricity erupted from the cannons of the ship in front of him. Lightning wrote stories between Genji and the clifftop, stinging and evaporating off his metal body, unable to strike true as he reached for his sword.

 

Behind him, he heard the omnic’s synthesizer issue a determined little grunt. A foot whose architecture and wiring conspired to shape a sandal impacted his lower back. Now that he was standing, the omnic kicked him off the cliff.

 

The sun and his impression of its many hands around him faded into the glare of wind against his falling body. His ribbon flapped long and untamed behind his helmet. The ships above squalled palpable iron creels as they tried to pivot after his wingless flight. Genji stared blankly at the flat glass slap of saltwater rising swiftly to meet him, then waved his arms and twisted his body around so he could see back the way he came.

 

The omnic’s signal lights were right above him. It was falling with him. They were face-to-face. The nearer ship stooped after them, but gravity had already sketched an impossible road for its engine acceleration. Genji flicked the omnic’s faceplate. It did not feel like anything special, hard silver. He could see a shade of his own reflection in it. The seam where the plate met the omnic’s gold jaw was a flat interlock of angles, but if he counted the corrosions darkening the faceplate, the center fraction almost looked like a smile. He traced his finger in a crescent over the seam.

 

“What are you?” he demanded.

 

The smiling omnic tipped its head. It reached out one finger to poke the brow of Genji’s helmet, but its hand slipped off. One of its rosary orbs whisked down between chassis and chestplate, and gold light bound it to Genji. Warm again. Genji touched the coils of the sphere carvings, arching his back toward the light, mouthing something behind his faceplate his synthesizer did not interpret. He could only hear the omnic:

 

“Zenyatta.”

 

They hit the brine. It was like cracking an ancient wall of bronze. His spinal plating crunched, and the omnic’s chassis collapsed into him from above. Zenyatta made a glittering scorpion flop off his side and sank beside him, pieces of wire and plate floating off its battered hull. Most of its orbs scattered on impact. The one above Genji smartly scooted over his head, holding onto him for a couple seconds before it faded and drifted away.

 

The robot was not moving, and the lights in its faceplate had gone colorless, and dim. The water darkened around them. Tiny clouds of fish whirled through the aura of Genji’s indicator lights. He cycled them off. The black ship hit the surface with a steamy discharge, bobbed around a few seconds, then waddled back into the air clumsy as a duck. There were cracks all over Zenyatta’s skinny frame, loose wires spoked out of joints like spider legs, shattered spinal coordinators in the back. Behind the omnic, further out to sea, Genji saw the buried city skyscrapers. The sky was a sunlit matrix of blue koi scales. They sank past a precipice crowned with a cruise ship.

 

But where he finally landed there was only velvety gravel, a few rocks fettering the natural circles in the earth, tumbled into divine stillness. A crab scurried over his abdomen. He passed his hand under his scabbards, but there was no damage to his back plates.

 

How much of this was a dream? Did he have a fever again? He thought he might, as he watched a long white-bellied fish with a tail like a kite glide slowly overhead. His father would always be at his side, telling him stories while they waited for Hanzo to bring back the medicine, because Hanzo was a paranoid idiot that did not trust security to handle it. No matter how old he was, or if he told him to _go away_ , Father would come up with something, and Genji would sleep and have the most vivid dreams, though not usually about what the old man had told him.

 

He thought he might be sick. Not feeling like he was going to vomit-- some fevers had definitely been hangovers, Father was way too forgiving --but like something else was wrong with him. He got really confused sometimes, but that was how fevers went. He looked around, but the only thing there was the wreckage of the omnic. It was creepy here, he did not like the way the ground swirled in little circles that had probably sat that way for a million years. But it was comforting too, the weight of the water on him, how the sun sometimes trailed across his bed and his armor like a reassuring hand.

 

Search lights. Genji rose from the seabed, a cape of murk winging off his shoulders. He picked up the omnic by the arms, throwing them over his shoulders. Zenyatta was light. The cracks in its arm struts seemed to be gone. He tried flipping it around piggyback, but it jammed his scabbards to odd angles. He settled for carrying it over his arms. Rings of ultrafast divers whose forms he could not decipher past their spotlights descended to higher seafloor strata and began hunting. He did not see the base of the cliff. A current must have borne them off somewhere else.

 

He walked the seabed till he had an idea of the ocean’s gradient to shore. He milled along the coastline till nightfall, and then started looking for a beach that appealed. Small shapes bobbed up to him more purposeful than fish, and he flashed his visor feed to nightvision. It was three of the orbs the omnic had been carrying around its neck. More joined them as Genji probed the shore for something other than long, dark cliffs.

 

When he got onto a white gravel beachhead, he dropped Zenyatta just off the tide line and walked around to investigate the corners of the area. He came back, sitting beside the omnic and removing his faceplate. Everything was dry underneath, he guessed he could thank Angela. Wind buffeted the skin around his eyes like tickling feathers. The moon looked diminutive and obscure when he was not viewing it through the visor feed. He snapped his armor back into place and it closed up with a hiss of airtight sealant.

 

He poked the frame of the omnic, but its most severe breakages had repaired, and its skeleton no longer resembled an eggshell that had met a sidewalk. A couple more orbs drifted out of the sea and gathered around its neck, shaking droplets from their surfaces.

 

Zenyatta sat up, sighing.

 

“Do you require sanctuary?” it asked Genji. Genji pulled his knees in to his chest, watching the robot over the top of his propped arms. Zenyatta waited for him a while, then elaborated, “A place to hide.” Genji lifted his head.

 

“This isn’t Japan, is it?”

 

Zenyatta reared back, twisted its faceplate around at the beach, and the pale dunes and palm trees scattered beyond it. It shook its head at Genji. “You speak Japanese,” Genji explained.

 

“That is how you first addressed me.”

 

“I thought perhaps…I did not understand anyone for a while, and then you…” Genji hefted his shoulders, looking out over his knees, as it was clear he had been misguided.

 

“I am aware of the most popularly spoken world languages.”

 

Genji coughed out a laugh, the omnic straightening next to him.

 

“Japanese is so common these days?”

 

“…top twenty,” Zenyatta allowed. “Do you want to go to Japan?” The green light of Genji’s visor reflected across the omnic’s face like a bright scar.

 

“I want people to leave me alone,” he said, with a full sullen measure. Zenyatta lowered its chin to its chest. Genji thought he might have gotten it to shut up.

 

“There is a bed where you can rest, and not be bothered,” it offered gently. “My full name is Tekhartha Zenyatta. What is your name?” Wind rattled the palms, raised the ocean into sharp fangs that rolled to shore.

 

“Genji.” He relaxed his legs and grabbed his ribbon as it tried to roll free behind his helmet. “What were you doing in the desert? The organization was there. That means there is a god program.”

 

“It is easier to flee over land than across a river, and I hoped to help any victims of the conflict that made it out. I only found one, however.”

 

“Yeah, a snake.” Genji looked down the soaked, tattered yellow pants covering Zenyatta’s legs. Even the robot’s feet were scarred with abrasions, which seemed odd for someone who was so opposed to walking. “Where is the bed?” Zenyatta peeked up at him, the blue lights bright on its head.

 

“Far away.” The signals dimmed a bit. “But if we can reach my brother in Cairo before he leaves, he can give us safe passage there.”

 

Genji at first believed he had only one question, but when he thought about it more he had _several_.

 

“You can take me to him.” Zenyatta tilted its head, making the little false smile on its faceplate hopefully lopsided. “Maybe he is more useful than you.”

 

“I expect so. I apologize if there ends up being any awkwardness. I am sure he will still accept you.”

 

“Awkwardness?”

 

“The last thing I told him was that I was leaving and not coming back.”

 

Genji looked away from Zenyatta, a ringing in his ears without source in his audio feed. There was only his name, “Genji?”, spoken by a synthesized voice. He looked back and Zenyatta was still there.

 

“Are you guys fighting?” The small robot was pathetic. Mr. Reyes called them walking noodles, but there were some that took two cuts to finish off. This one had to die just from a good look at the point of the blade. No matter the craftsmanship of its brother, it had to get trounced every time. Useless.

 

“We have disagreements. We do not fight.”

 

Genji felt something hot down the side of his face, streaming out of his reach, out of sight. Still, the omnic asked, “Are you alright?”

 

He shook his head, meaning _leave it_ rather than _no_. Then he wondered if the robot could interpret the signal, keyed up his synthesizer-- but Zenyatta beat him to interruption. “Do you want to start walking?”

 

Genji started laughing.

 

“That’s a funny thing for you to say.” He tucked his feet down in the sand, stretching his arms forward over his knees, as if his muscles might cramp without a proper warm-up. He got up and dusted off his rear, looking around, tipping his visor at one of the tall, rindy palm trees leaned over by the wind. “I guess…”

 

He glanced at the omnic. It was still plopped on the ground. Its head seemed to be oriented at the same palm Genji had been studying, and it took a couple seconds for it to notice him and heft itself up. As expected, it floated off the ground with no more exertion than what it took to fold its legs in. It did not brush off any of the sand stuck to its pants. He was going to say something, but it nodded to him, like they had an agreement, and led the way south.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : The ugly duckling has sent you a friend request.  
> 
>   * Japanese is currently #9 in the most popular languages list. English is #3.
>   * The Overwatch Visual Source Book has a couple nice drawings of Zenyatta standing up, if you ever need a reference. It also refers to Genji's short sword (which I have been calling a tanto) as a wakizashi, so I have corrected my terminology accordingly.
>   * It only took 7 chapters for Zenyatta to earn his character tag!
>   * Happy New Year =)
> 



	8. Brothers

 

Cairo approached across the flat of the desert, eyes before ears. Obelisks studded with LEDs broke through pink dawn smog, and glass skyscrapers prowled out between ceramic minarets. Palm trees in lamp-like vessels flooded vertical along swerves of architecture, fronds making slow waves like tentacles deep in the sea. He heard a hell of taxi horns. The sand brought them to a market line of striped, colorful tents. Zenyatta stopped beside him, at the border of human things.

 

They had been out west a few days, picking their way around the indiscriminate fires of Overwatch’s presence. Like sand and wind, Zenyatta traveled mostly in silence, but it never stopped. Genji did not think much of their dogged progress; the omnic was a machine. But now its head drooped as it hovered at his side. It separated the steeple of its thumbs, relaxing its hands out over its bent knees.

 

“Are you low battery?” Genji guessed.

 

Zenyatta’s bald silver head poked up, wavered, sank again without answer. Genji sighed and turned around, examining the path that led them here, the single trail of footprints through the dunes. He noticed the oddity of Zenyatta’s shadow: triangles of sunlight leaking through places where its frame only approximated humanity. He traced the gaps of light to its waist. There was a cloth that had once been white dangling, full of holes, from the red braid serving as its belt.

 

The fabric was much more ornate than anything else in the robot’s possession, a bleached pattern of hexagon scales interlocking through the surface. “Are you scared of your brother?” Genji tried again.

 

“No.” Zenyatta pinned its fingers back up in front of its chest. “This place and its memories trouble me.”

 

“It is only a city.” Jet engines rang two and three in chorus over the sour coils of oud strings from the market stalls. Ghostly swathes of cotton cut shadows down the street, and any omnic walking underneath striped in and out of shine.

 

Targeting chevrons pipped over chrome skulls.

 

“Genji.”

 

He followed his synthesized name away from the maelstrom of bodies, focusing Zenyatta’s scratched tin face. The robot held out its open palm. Genji realized he had bent his arm behind his back to retrieve the katana, and dropped his fingers off the hilt. A faint red outline cloaked Zenyatta’s arm strut, and its unarmored chassis. Genji blinked his visual feed clear of mission assistance. “Let us hurry to my brother,” Zenyatta insisted, upheld hand transformed to a directing palm at the heart of Cairo.

 

“Okay,” Genji breathed out, mostly in static. He plodded after Zenyatta as the omnic resumed floating east. His stride kept him virtually at its side, and he took cues off the start of its turns so that they bent around the urban earth like a fish school of two.

 

“If anyone looks at you inappropriately, take it as a sign that we are not dressed in a respectful manner-- not anything else.” Genji studied his body reflexively, kanji to feet. Sunlight gleamed off the dusty wings of silver that had replaced his pectoral muscles, made feathery etchings of his cream armor panels, and highlighted the gentle split of his feet into two-toed shoes. Hardening dirt pack scuffed the edges of his footsteps as he kept east… “Genji,” Zenyatta’s voice rose.

 

The omnic was not at his side when he looked up. Genji searched the panels of human economy, and Zenyatta waved at him from beside an alleyway. He stumbled over, stopping only so he did not run over a girl in a knit white shirt and pale jeans, her face pressed out of her lavender leopard hijab like a bronze canvas. She had large brown eyes that searched over him when he reared back with his hands in the air. Her pupils tightened to mousey dots, and she bustled away. She was carrying a bouquet of violet and white flowers, the container probably too heavy by how she kept adjusting her arms. Genji wondered if somebody had died. A whisper of birdseed and weeds in an old forest teased across his nose.

 

He followed Zenyatta. The alley was brick and closed doors, daylight a golden layer on the walls above the shade where they walked. They passed a single squat building that dared to paint its backside robin’s egg blue. Genji looked up at the alley rooftops. Satellite dishes knotted in rusty disrepair along some of the tiling, silver wires threaded from one side to another. A couple fat pigeons sat together in a patch of sunlight and the straw ambitions of a nest, ticking their dusty turquoise heads at him.

 

The alley flowed into a circle of roads, where buildings were monolithic slabs affixed with columnar glass endcaps, and statues of men sat in robes and cobra hood crowns. Just over the peaks of skyscrapers Genji made out the faded body of a glossy metal pyramid. A robotic shell had been nailed over the original stonework, and netted the sun out of the sky, casting it down the street in eyepopping reflection. Genji intensified the glare protection on his visor feed. Zenyatta braced the side of its hand against the top of its head, glided to a street corner, and settled with a rustle of its synthesizer.

 

“What are you waiting for?” Genji asked.

 

“We have to cross the street.”

 

Hovercars piled across the road seven lanes thick, though Genji could not determine if all the channels were official. Black-and-white taxis crammed in jigsaw lock before a glittering mosque of blue glass. A steel blimp bobbed sluggishly overhead, turning toward the pyramid with a circular pulse of its yellow engines. A befuddled human family in shorts and t-shirts made a daisy chain between the restless jam of tour buses, retreating when one lurched close to running over their youngest. The walk signal became active at the other side, but the cars piled through whenever they could move anyway. “Patience,” Zenyatta cautioned.

 

“They are all like Jesse,” Genji growled at the cars. After five minutes, the herd thinned enough that a canny, zig-zagging traveler could pass. With a look at each other, he and Zenyatta trekked into the street. Genji pounced the destination sidewalk, glanced back, and returned to seize Zenyatta’s wrist and haul the omnic away from the grill of a hungry garbage truck.

 

“My thanks,” Zenyatta squeaked. It ducked into a residential warren, the concrete under Genji’s feet transforming into sturdy plasmetal. A group of young men in long-sleeve shirts and loose trousers were laughing together on a stoop, falling silent when they noticed the omnic. One lifted his phone to take a picture of Genji. He heard more camera clicks at his back. Genji stopped beside a footpath median filled with water and lotus petals, tilting his head at the noise. “I did not have enough money to procure appropriate clothing,” Zenyatta reminded him. “Almost there.”

 

Genji held his fake breath, and decided to follow the robot to another side street. They traveled between rows of two-story houses with round, sloped backs like the wing carapace of scarabs. Most were painted white, but units of tan, salmon, and soft gold interwove in sandstone pageantry. Flowers dotted the front walls of each house’s yard by the bushel, till the barriers looked like they were made of only petals and leaves. Children crisscrossed the walkway, ignoring them. A pair of women with gray hair tied back over their shoulders and wall blossoms embedded in the braiding chatted at a low table. One waved to Zenyatta, which cycled its palm around in return.

 

The house at the end of the street was the only one with a car parked out front: a limousine with tinted windows. Genji slowed, staring up the blunted face of the white tomb. He and Zenyatta passed beneath the translucent periwinkle leaves of an artificial tree, and as the omnic emerged into full sunlight, the front door of the limo house swung open. An omnic with in-coiled spikes on its head and six pink bars glowing over the sides of its faceplate stepped out, dressed in a suit. Genji thought its head looked like an ant’s.

 

“Master!” it cried in high, sharp English. “If you just called, I would have sent you a car!” It jogged down the front steps and pushed out the house gate, circling the limo to meet Zenyatta. It cupped an armored hand over the top of Zenyatta’s head. “Do you take that much offense to wearing a top?” it chided.

 

“I believe I was mugged as I was departing the city,” Zenyatta explained mildly. The other omnic tapped two fingers between its pink lights, then palmed over Zenyatta’s shoulders and back, seeking damage. Zenyatta raised a hand and the search ended with a whine from the rebuked party, noise cutting short as its spiked head lifted toward Genji.

 

“What’s that?” it demanded, pointed shoulders rising, voice paling.

 

“Genji is with me.”

 

“I know that, that’s why I haven’t shot it yet.”

 

Zenyatta contemplated the much taller omnic.

 

“You would use a weapon in this place?” it asked. The ant ticked at Zenyatta, then back at Genji.

 

“No Master, of course not,” it grumbled. “Wait here, I need to talk with my boss.” It pried open the house gate, then glanced at Zenyatta. “You going to be okay…?”

 

“I will be fine.”

 

The ant omnic’s lights dimmed, but it departed into the house. Genji stepped even with Zenyatta.

 

“Your brother has bodyguards?”

 

“Unfortunately, he finds it necessary for his work,” Zenyatta sighed. Genji rocked his weight from one foot prosthesis to the other.

 

“Your brother is a robot?”

 

“Yes.” Zenyatta was watching a few green lacewings trace habits over the flowers in front of the house, but at that question turned its face to Genji.

 

“What…” Genji groaned into a sky assuming the color of Angela’s eyes. “You are his brother, too?” he struggled.

 

“Yes.”

 

The ant emerged, with three other suits. There was another omnic, and two humans, one armed with a tablet as he walked out to Genji. The ant hung close to him, glaring over his shoulder at the tablet.

 

“You speak English or Arabic?” the human asked, scratching the striped silver hair over his ear while an omnic repeated his question in the second language. Genji nodded at the word _English_ and the security boss waited for verbal confirmation, which he did not get. “Name?” he sniffed.

 

“Genji.”

 

“Give her your weapons.” The human poked his weathered finger at the ant. Genji remained still. “What’s your last name?” Genji was silent. The human turned to Zenyatta. “He’s not coming inside with the uh…swords. Even if it’s your word, Zen.” Genji’s synthesizer hissed, and everyone looked at him. He drew his chin to his chest, then released his scabbards from their tethers. He jammed the weapons into the iron skeleton of the flower wall, petals scattering at his feet.

 

“Do not touch,” he snapped at the bodyguards in English. The boss’s eyebrows popped up like rearing caterpillars. Zenyatta escaped to the gate, and Genji followed him.

 

Security shadowed them up the stairs. A few frames along the staircase showed a dark-skinned man and a small boy in different places, or sometimes just the man, holding hands with other humans and in a few cases with robots. Zenyatta passed a rich red door with golden filigree, only to stop and turn around. He extended his hand to the curving door handle and waited in quiet welcome.

 

Genji’s visor light reflected off the bronze handle. He pushed the door open.

 

On a divan sat an omnic in a dove-colored robe. He was surrounded by other machines, mechanical hands winging his shoulders, unadorned heads bowed to him as synth voices bubbled harmoniously around his resting place. As Genji stepped in, the omnic’s shiny white faceplate raised toward the door, a nine-light diamond flashing across his forehead.

 

A lotus with hundreds of petals comforted the red floor, carpet edges tasseled gold. The robots collected around the divan wore yellow cloth like Zenyatta. A chandelier of stained glass ringed the room in warm light. All the omnics, even the seated one, shared Zenyatta’s flimsy body model, but their faceplates differed, counting various numbers of dot lights, etching eye slots at different angles.

 

Genji shuffled out of the way to let Zenyatta into view, observing the white-faced omnic’s response. He stood up, tallest among his kind but no challenge to monsters like the humans or the ant on his security team. Zenyatta held out his hand to Genji, but the other omnic advanced swiftly on him, swallowing Zenyatta in a tight hug. Zenyatta’s arm bobbed stiffly, frozen outward. The force of the embrace shifted his chin up and over his counterpart’s shoulder, and their lights fluttered to each other. As Genji watched, he reeled his arm to his brother’s back, patting naked silver shoulderblades.

 

_I think I am in one…_

 

“One what?” Zenyatta asked, peeking at him over the hug. Genji realized he had spoken aloud.

 

“One of those nightmares you can remember,” he moaned. Zenyatta bowed his golden chin, and grazed the side of the robed omnic’s neck to coax him up.

 

“This is Genji,” he said, resuming his introduction. “He requires sanctuary. Genji, this is my brother Mondatta. He will help you.”

 

Mondatta surrendered his grip. He turned to his guest and bowed.

 

“Welcome, Genji. Do you need water, or food…?” he wondered. Genji stared, shook his head. Mondatta and Zenyatta blinked lights to each other almost in unison, and Mondatta said, “I see. The brothers and sisters of the Shambali will see you to safe--”

 

“Are you talking?” Genji demanded. Mondatta’s arm, extended toward the other robots in the room, lowered elegantly to his side. “When the lights on your head go like that.”

 

“You cannot hear us?” A tremor coursed through Mondatta’s voice. “Do you have a Net connection, Genji?”

 

“I had…I could only access the organization’s servers. But I deleted them. I deleted the connection.”

 

Nearly all the omnics in the room blinked to each other, no different from a rooftop or a warehouse or a broken, bloody village, or any of the other graveyards Mr. Reyes had shown him. Genji’s visor blazed, his visual feed manifested fresh reticules, his shoulders slammed into the wall. Bodyguards pushed between him and the sandal-clad robots.

 

“Please, everyone--” Mondatta gazed over the shoulders of his hires at Genji, his faceplate stuck on a kindly expression. “Try activating a personal network. It would be the same as...”

 

“Like interacting with someone’s phone!” one of the others volunteered.

 

“Exactly, thank you.”

 

“Mondatta…” Zenyatta dissented.

 

Genji glowered through the wall of bodyguards at the shabby omnic, the dirtiest and most abraded of the lot. The target lights over the others dissipated as he resolutely thought of Amari’s phone. His memory tripped into Jesse’s photo gallery, jazz, the ops server opening to him for a mission report.

 

Well-wishes coiled around him. Text data, but reception was more like a phantom hand extended to him from each of the Shambali in the room. _Hi Genji! Nice to meet you! Let us be friends!_ Friend requests matched the number of small silver omnics before him. There was even a cached invite from several days earlier with Zenyatta’s name on it. Gasping, Genji ripped out of the connection, and had a flash of himself nailed to the wall like a bug in a collector’s tin. Zenyatta was speaking. “Perhaps it would be better to simply speak what is on your mind for now,” he advised Mondatta firmly. Mondatta’s faceplate canted at Genji like an unpainted Noh mask.

 

“That seems appropriate. I apologize, Genji.” Mondatta waited till the cyborg heaved himself free of the wall. He motioned the bodyguards back out the door. “The Shambali welcome you,” he offered in a gentle swell of his synthesizer. “Our sanctum is a safe place, and we will take you there.”

 

“The organization…” Genji mumbled as he caught his breath. “They would be scared of so many of you in one place.” Mondatta glanced at Zenyatta. “Overwatch,” Genji clarified.

 

“Overwatch?” Mondatta wagged his segmented finger. “For them to approach us in our home would risk an international incident.” His voice sounded like a smile. “Though it is my hope that someday our political views will not be our only protection.”

 

“It is you, Mondatta!” one of the other Shambali exclaimed, her synth higher than his or Zenyatta’s. “You are the one who has won our legitimacy in this world.” The others cheered among themselves, except Zenyatta who was silent. Mondatta held up his hand to steady them.

 

“Genji.” He thought it was Zenyatta again, but it was the brother. “We will depart in the morning. Until then, perhaps you would care to rest.” Mondatta swept his arm to the next room over. “We have some beds, though we do share the quarters. Will that suffice?" Genji got out an unsteady nod. “Very good. I must leave and finish my business here in the city. Would the rest of you go and make ready? I would like to speak with Genji alone.”

 

The other omnics in the room let themselves out the door. Genji did not think Zenyatta would listen, but when he looked over the floating stray had gone too. Mondatta brought his fingertips together at his stomach. “I will not keep you. I only wanted to thank you.”

 

“For what?”

 

“For bringing Zenyatta back to me.” Mondatta bowed deeply to Genji.

 

He followed the others outside, and a bodyguard shut the door behind him.

 

Genji dropped himself on the divan, laying his helmet on one of the pillows. A photo of Mondatta and the man from the staircase smiled at him from the wall. He heard the towncar pull away from the house’s front gate. He had not seen any ledgers or signs of the omnics’ enterprises, but if this was only a safehouse he supposed they would not be kept here.

 

The lounge door opened. It was Zenyatta. Genji propped his elbow on the pillow where he had been resting his head.

 

“Why are you not helping Mondatta with his business?” he rasped, synth still imitating breathlessness.

 

“I am here to support you, not him,” Zenyatta answered. “What did you think?”

 

“I have no idea what your goal is.”

 

“Perhaps it will become clearer when we reach the monastery.” Zenyatta tilted his head at the divan. “If you would prefer to rest here, I am sure my brother will not mind.”

 

“I would not be so quick to assume you know what your brother is thinking.” Genji rubbed his neck.

 

“Are you making a joke?” the robot asked. Genji ignored him. “I will be in the bedroom if you require me,” he added. Genji looked over, but Zenyatta had already glided to the other room.

 

The other omnics returned in the evening, long after Genji had excavated every corner of the lounge, and gone out through the house with the ant-headed bodyguard at his back. He saved the bedroom for last, uncertain of what to expect: charger cables, stasis pods?

 

But it was only a storage space filled with cots and plant fiber bedding.

 

Zenyatta floated above one of the beds, his hands over his knees, thumb and forefinger pinched together on each side. His shadow was a diamond of intersecting light and dark on the wall behind him. Genji shied to a bed at the opposite wall and hunted under it for cables, but found nothing. He lay down on his side, facing the unpainted plaster. The returning Shambali were loud out in the lounge, but quieted as they entered the bedroom. After half an hour, all Genji heard was the occasional creak of mattress springs.

 

He thought of the shuriken in his arm, rolled three out between his fingers. He turned the weapons in the quieted light of his visor, and withdrew them into the reload apparatus. Clockwork gears spun audibly as he rolled the stars out a second time, and back in. He looked over his shoulder. The omnics were all lying down, in various postures, the light fixtures on their heads dimmed but not extinguished, so that each lay in their own blue aura.

 

Zenyatta, still seated while Mondatta slept in the bed beside him, raised his head as Genji squirmed. Genji bunched his shoulders and rolled back over. He heard the omnic sigh, and the cot frame rattled. When Genji investigated a few minutes later, Zenyatta had laid down at Mondatta’s back. All the omnics were still and quiet. Occasionally a metal hand would grasp, or a head turn to the song of an unseen dream.

 

Genji curled up and stared at the wall till it brightened, and birds started singing outside the narrow window.

 

Mondatta stirred and murmured a question on the other side of the room. Zenyatta cut him off, advising, “He is awake.” Genji waited till most of the omnics were moving around to sit up.

 

“Good morning, Genji,” a robot across from him greeted. The others looked over, and rang out their own tiny synthesized hellos. Genji rested his hands over his knees, silent while they moved on to talking with each other. Trails of sand dusted his bedsheets.

 

“There is a shower, though we share that too,” Mondatta offered. One of the other robots approached him and adjusted his clothing, only to go around the back and mutter an oath. “Unfortunately I must insist that Zenyatta go first. Hopefully we can get his laundry dry before we leave.” The floating anomaly had already been banished from the room. “It is a bit more spacious at our home,” Mondatta chuckled. Other robots clustered at his back and tried to clean off his robe with cloths and spritzes of fabric wash while they waited for their turn at the shower.

 

Under the faucet, Genji faced tawny seashell tiles, looking over his hands for splashes of red. When he realized they were not even the same hands, he balled them against the tile and leaned forward, hanging his head into the stream. He fiddled the temperature dial on the shower fixture up and down, to no special result except a fluctuation in the numeric Celsius readout from his sensors.

 

When he was carrying Zenyatta in the sea, the omnic's metal had been warm in his arms.

 

Eventually he felt clarified enough to investigate the grooming products hanging off a suction cup basket on the wall next to him. Human shampoos and soaps, but some bottles with pictures of omnics on them too. One had an omnic with a chassis sculpted to evoke breasts, waist pinched narrow, wearing a long dress, a red bow affixed to her bald head. He turned the bottle around to read the back, but did not know the script, ultimately returning it to the basket without use.

 

Genji did not see Zenyatta again until they arrived at an airfield outside the city. There were multiple black cars this morning, and security held the door open for him. He was packed in with three of the others. “I hope you understand if we do not talk much,” one said. “Zenyatta told us to let you relax.”

 

He nodded. He thought the omnics might chat among themselves on their Net connection, but none of the forehead lights blinked.

 

Mondatta owned a pale jet that reminded Genji of a hand-me-down archer’s bow, a pod below the center of the recurved crescent supporting most of the passenger space. Zenyatta was already seated when he stepped on, cross-legged on a blue armchair, picking at the threads of his freshly dried pant hem. Genji passed him and took a seat at the back.

 

Mondatta conversed with the others a while, then excused himself to a room at the rear. He paused by Genji only long enough to show him how to manually control the lighting around his seat, and the softness of the cushions. Genji peered over his armrest at the Shambali leader's room, but there was only one entrance and two of the bodyguards stationed outside it.

 

He settled for the window view. It reminded him of the bullet train, but instead of restaurants and sakuras outside, there were twinkles and white tails of other craft, and a blank heaven studded by auroras of floating celestial garbage.

 

They were only flying for an hour, and most of it was departure time, then landing time, circling. When the jet fell below the cirrostratus layer, Genji saw cobbled houses floating on waves of snow-covered rock. A family of mountains gathered for warmth, the circular valley between their feet obscured by a coat of frost. Mondatta’s ship glided down the only peak with architecture, hovering into landing beside a plateau. Silver-scaled wings folded up like a boat sail, profiling a tall shadow across the welcoming party.

 

Twenty or so omnics and some humans in wooly parkas gathered beside the exit ramp. Many of the omnics threw themselves at Mondatta, who filed his way politely through their greetings and joined his hands just under his golden jaw, bowing his head to the humans. Genji stood at the back of the discharged flock and looked up the mountain. At the top rose a high wall, towers and pennants nested inside: a castle.

 

“Genji.” It was Zenyatta, the last to depart the jet, hovering at his back like a foil shadow. Had probably been observing his reaction. Genji glared at him. “Are you cold?” Zenyatta raised his faceplate toward the distant castle when Genji did not answer. His body reflected the blue of the sky. “I wanted to tell you that we usually adjust our thermal sensing to minus five here.”

 

“There is nothing to adjust. I can’t feel anything like that,” the cyborg snorted. Zenyatta floated forward, coming even with him, head dipped away from anything that might approximate eye contact. Genji found it difficult to keep angry surveillance over him, and waved his hand at the gathering in front.

 

“This is all there is? The thirty of you?”

 

“Yes, these are my brothers and sisters who succeeded in traveling here. And our dear friends, who took us in.” Zenyatta held out his palm to the humans. Mondatta was hugging one of them, who cradled his steely arm in return. “As my brother travels, others have pledged to join us, but I think they may see the mountain and become dissuaded. I have advised him to consider a settlement somewhere less hostile.”

 

Some of the greeting party left Mondatta’s side to approach Zenyatta. They circled the stray in a many-armed embrace, and then withdrew like a polite line of ladybirds, clapping their hands to prayer under their chins and ducking their heads. They issued greetings, but Genji did not recognize the words. Zenyatta lifted his hand and made a window-washing circle, replying to them in the same inscrutable language. The hand extended to Genji.

 

“This is our guest, for as long as he prefers,” he told them in Japanese.

 

“Hello Genji!” said one of the strangers, now in Japanese as well.

 

“I am glad to meet you, Genji!”

 

They made point-accurate bows to him.

 

“Hello…” he mumbled, staying upright. Zenyatta had not told them his name. Lights flickered between the robots, and the one with the highest voice stepped forward and held out her hand. Genji’s visor light wavered over the offering. He reached out and wrapped his prosthesis around whatever he should call a hand that had never been flesh.

 

Her fingers gave off a bit of heat. She was wearing red cloth over her torso in a sleeveless cross, with a shallow v-neckline, but he did not think her chassis had been exaggerated or modified. She just looked like Zenyatta, with an inverted triangle of seven lights on her head, and a gentle rise to her eye slots like a couple flattened apostrophes.

 

“Wow!” she laughed, and Genji released her, visor flickering. The omnic made an artful shake of her head, the way a girl would if she had hair to flash around. “You are really strong!”

 

“Where might we have a room available for him?” Zenyatta asked. After a brief conference with the others, the omnic said, “There is an empty room next to my old quarters, if that is alri--”

 

“No.”

 

“Could you indicate where you would like to stay?” Zenyatta revised patiently. “You are free to look around.”

 

Genji searched the omnic’s static face, but heard the clank of a dress shoe on the ramp behind. The bodyguards lingered at the jet door: the two humans, nose tips already red from the cold, and the ant with the pink bar eyes. All were watching him. So he took Zenyatta’s offer, prowled away from the landing site, and leaped onto the roof of the nearest building, landing feline on the old icy tiles. A human exclamation sounded from the room below him. He crouched to poke a couple ancient satellite dishes, and jumped away as peeps of awe rose from the omnics.

 

Someone had been cleaning snow off the red avenues between houses, fighting the continuous tumbleweeds of frost from the mountain. Transient white koi tails flapped off juts of rock over his head. Painted brick lined the swept paths, pipes rising out of foundations, piles of firewood leaning against the walls, lanterns suspiciously oily in scent on the stoops. Genji laid the side of his helmet on the wall of one house, and upon determining no one was inside, jimmied open the wooden window and let himself in.

 

The interior prescribed tones of amber: yellow carpets, candlelight, the earthy aroma of cut wood. A shielding element rippled over his body as he invaded the window frame, and his Celsius record jumped to 22. He had come in on the stairwell. A music stream danced down in the kitchen, muted drums and cymbals beating behind voices with the nimbleness of woodwinds. Genji creeped upstairs, stopping in the doorway of a room painted cornflower blue.

 

Sunlight faceted through squares in the window screen, gleaming off his armor as he walked across a thin striped rug to a cradle in the middle of the room. It was empty. He lifted the blanket in it to be sure. He looked into the mobile above the cradle: purple flowers, knock-offs of old kid movie characters, and white elephants with ceremonial saddles. His finger tapped one of the rods supporting the mobile charms, giving it a spin. The mobile issued a few notes of wind chime lullaby.

 

Footsteps crunched through the snow outside, and the cyborg slipped back out of the room, down the stairs to his fire escape. But the steps came around that side of the wall, so Genji raced to the first floor.

 

The door stood open, even with no one home. He hopped off the stoop and hid around the nearest corner, peeking out to see who approached. It was an old woman with a stout frame and silver hair, carrying a basket of threads and weaving tools. It seemed too much to carry. She kept adjusting her arms under the weight of the wicker basket. She was missing one eye.

 

Genji’s cheeks heated under his mask as he kept hiding, leaving only when the old grandmother disappeared into her musical house.

 

Next he went to the edge of the plateau, jumping over the wooden barrier fence. The only sounds here were the whips of ragged banners behind him. A makeshift cairn sketched him in shadow. He rotated his shoulders a couple times, and sprang off the edge. Was there a barrier here like in the house, only preventing anyone from leaving rather than holding the frost at bay? His toes touched nothing but open air. Genji spread out the full wingspan of his arms, tipping his shoulders toward the mountainside. He flipped out of gravity’s claw, back onto the plateau.

 

He smiled as he hung from one hand on the rocky lip. At first he thought he could see nothing in the valley below, but as he watched, brown wings of sluggish vultures circled in and out of the clouds. He had not known it was possible to live higher than a vulture flew. Ascending the village paths, picking his way to the center, he discovered a large building with wooden screen walls, some picnic tables and shrines resting inside, candles humming light in the corners.

 

Genji scouted the perimeter and heard more steps. But it was easier to focus here: he also detected the micromechanical adjustments of a robotic body not restricted to walking, and stopped at an intersection ahead of it. Zenyatta floated out right in front of him. His silver head turned sharply to the cyborg, who had crouched hound-like to await him.

 

“Oh, Genji.” Zenyatta’s synthesizer rang a little high. “Did you decide where you would like to rest?” The other omnics were looking at him too. Genji straightened, searching his visual feed, looking up as he noticed a dark room at the top of a long, closed building. It did not look like any other rooms or houses were directly linked to the cavity. He pointed at it.

 

“But, that is the loft,” one of the junior robots murmured. “The animals are kept below. It may smell…?”

 

Genji walked up to the building. A goat bleated behind the closed doors of the lower level. He vaulted atop the walkway to the loft, entering the room.

 

He strolled back out.

 

“It does not smell.”

 

“It may be difficult to reach you there,” Zenyatta warned.

 

“Good.” Genji retreated into the bare wooden space, sliding the shutters closed at front and back. Though the loft resembled Zenyatta on the outside, shabby and forlorn, he heard a thermal shield click into place as one of the omnics tapped a switchbox below. The rolling mutters of the wind muted. He had not been entirely honest: he could smell hay, and herbs that hung from the ceiling of the barn space below. But the animals were just sounds, guttural cries or the floor-shaking taps of hooves, like simulations.

 

The cyborg sat down against the wall of his empty shelter, wedging himself into the corner. His swords creaked awkwardly. He removed them, throwing the scabbards on the floor. Once he cycled down his indicator lights, the glints off the black handles left him, and the loft went dark. He tapped the back of his hand against the wall, turned it around and groped his fingers over the wood, but all his body told him was that he could probably break it if he struck hard enough.

 

* * *

 

Metal feet clunked across the walkway to the loft’s front door. Genji lifted his visor off his knees, lights glowing on. _Knock-knock._

 

“Sorry for disturbing you,” an omnic said. It was not Zenyatta’s synth. “We brought some furniture for you.”

 

“Maybe he is not home?” a second omnic wondered.

 

“We are coming in now,” the first decided, and brushed open the shutter. Genji was on his feet, watching the robots enter, waiting for one to level a gun or lunge at him. But the hands of these two were fully occupied by a mattress. They noticed Genji only after laying the burden down. “Hello,” one said, bowing. He had a trio of lights on his head, the other four in a square. “We will be back a few times, so as to bring everything. Is that alright?”

 

“…I will help you.”

 

“You do not have to. Master Zenyatta said you needed rest.”

 

“It will get done faster if I help,” Genji sighed. “If Zenyatta cares so much, why is he not with you?”

 

“He is with Master Mondatta,” the square light omnic piped in. “They are resolving…um…Mondatta called it an ‘international incident’.”

 

Genji dashed out of his room. The reflective sails of Mondatta’s ship no longer shined over the village. Instead there was a bulky, three-story orange insult, an Overwatch heavy cruiser abutted to the frozen rock. Genji jumped from the commons building onto the brown tiles topping the border between the village core and the outskirts.

 

Zenyatta and Mondatta stood on the landing pad together, facing a squad of Overwatch agents piling off the cruiser ramp. Blue armor glistened in the clouded sun, faces were limited to heavy black tactical masks with O2 collectors. The agents carried rifles at rest against the slants of their hips. None of Mondatta’s security detail were present, nor any of the other Shambali omnics. None of the agents looked familiar. No silhouette matches to the height-weight profiles in his memory, no one rolling thunder, no one with a sixshooter.

 

The robots gestured, Zenyatta at first, then Mondatta. Genji fixed his helmet’s audio reception on the patterns of their synthesizers, trying to filter them out from the mountain wind, but he was still too distant. Mondatta thrust his arm left and a hologram appeared: a woman, U.N. logo printed behind her transmission. The Overwatch agents became visibly antsy, rolling their shoulders, tapping fingers on their rifle cases.

 

After a few minutes, the soldiers retreated into the cruiser and it departed, a ball of extinguished fire through the mist off the mountaintops. The two omnics observed till Overwatch disappeared from their skies.

 

Genji flattened himself to the roof tiles as they turned to each other. Zenyatta’s hand wrapped over Mondatta’s shoulder, and he cupped his other palm to the back of Mondatta’s skull. He tipped their lighted foreheads together.

 

Genji’s visor blinked uselessly. He lowered his eyes to his own hands cracking the tiles. He lurched off to the loft walkway, intercepting the junior Shambali as they were bringing a chair inside.

 

“Is everything alright?” one asked.

 

“Yes, you can go,” Genji commanded as they clunked the chair legs to the floor.

 

“Did you want any candles?”

 

“It’s fine like this.” He closed the shutter in their faces.

 

* * *

 

The cyborg was incapable of sleep, but he thought that if he found a mirror, and peeled off his helmet, the face underneath might look waxen and blue around the eyes. Or maybe Angela had engineered him better than that.

 

Zenyatta’s allies had not come to pester him, and he had grown used to the occasional disturbance of someone walking by below, or entering the lower level to tend the other animals. Sometimes he brightened his indicators to confirm he was still lying on a mattress in a wooden box, relieved when the scenery did not change.

 

A sheep cried in the stable below. Voices, one synthesized and one authentic, bled back and forth in another language he could not understand. They laughed as the sheep continued bawling. Genji’s muscles shook, invisible flies lighting down his back and arms as the animal audibly struggled. He lifted his head. The sheep dropped silent.

 

He pried open the loft’s back shutter and climbed out onto the rear path. Squeezing under the railing, he hung his head upside-down to peer through the translucent shield screens lining the back of the stable.

 

An omnic with a single cyclopean dot of light glowing between his slots restrained a ewe in a seated posture against his yellow pants, her rump cushioned on a bed of straw. Opposite him was the old woman with the missing eye, squatting on a footstool with a steaming mug between her mittens. She nodded, and the omnic activated a pair of electric shears, clearing off the sheep’s overgrown bundles of fleece. The sheep closed her long lashes when the shears went over her head, and otherwise appeared settled with her cleansing. Her shortened down was pale and unharmed by the omnic’s technique. He chatted with the woman as he worked.

 

The woman eventually glanced left, to a shadow dribbling along the stall floor like a snake. Genji followed the rise of her head as she sought the shadow’s origins, only to find her looking up at his visor. She yelped in surprise. He grabbed the ribbon dangling off his helmet and yanked himself out of view, clocking his head on the platform railing. The buzz of the shears stopped, and the omnic talked with his host.

 

Shearing resumed after a couple minutes, and Genji heard them both walking out of the stable later.

 

A hard _tock_ on the loft’s front shutter rattled through his chest, and he crossed over to his mattress, crouching on it and eyeing his swords lying on the other side of the room.

 

“I am coming in now,” a familiar voice rang from the other side, and the female omnic who had shook his hand at the landing pad entered, a broom in her hands. She looked around uncertainly, finally noticing the bunched cyborg in the corner. “Oh, sorry. I will knock more quietly next time. Are you sensitive to loud noises too?”

 

“Not all of them,” he protested, tipping his visor at the floor.

 

“The Master thought you might be. But we also realized we never swept this room before allowing you in, so…” She flicked the broom across the floor, opening the back shutter to take the dust off the mountainside. Genji watched her for a couple minutes, sitting down cross-legged with his hands pressed to the mattress padding.

 

“He brings me here, but makes the rest of you do all the work,” he scolded. “Seems lazy.” The omnic paused her sweep to reply.

 

“His time is better spent teaching.” She looked down and cleared a few smaller specks into a single weedy dust bunny, scooting it out to the open air. “We are so fortunate to have him back, I was sure he was gone for good this time.” She pivoted in the doorway, sunlight wreathed around her skinny construction, and tipped her head at Genji. “He has wanted to stop by, but he thought his presence upset you. I can tell him to visit if you like.”

 

Genji turned his face away. “Well, I will be back in one week, at this time. Do you have a calendar app?”

 

He nodded. He was not sure it was synced to an official source anymore, but he felt the data input whenever he considered time-sensitive matters. The omnic’s upside-down triangle of lights brightened at him. “Good. Put down Monday, at nine…be ready for a knock.” She held up her instrument. “And a broom.”

 

“Thanks,” he wheezed as she let herself out the door. He laid down on his bed and waited for Monday at nine. It was not as easy to remain corpse-like here as it was in the desert. He kept hearing laughter, and ventured out to investigate the cause. Unable to understand what anyone was saying, he watched the omnics turn their expressionless faces, listened to the exaggerations of their synths, and tried piecing together the gist of conversations.

 

At night he would go out on the walkway behind the loft, drop down the mountain face, planning an escape route should he ever need it. The clouds tended to rise or clear in the dark, and in the early morning the wide-winged vultures circled the amorphous valley below. One day he was watching the birds orbit and heard a song from the mountaintop. He climbed onto the loft roof and gazed at the castle above. The melody that rang down to him was made for metal voices, crafted like a dance for the rainbow flags waving off the spire heights.

 

Monday, at precisely nine, a muffled knock rustled the front shutter. Genji lay on his bed, facing the comfort of his steady wooden wall, but offered a “come in”. He listened to the placid rhythm of the scraping broom.

 

“Hey,” he murmured to the omnic. “Do you think that Zenyatta is still fighting with Mondatta?”

 

“I told you.” Male voice.

 

Genji bolted upright. Zenyatta was sweeping next to him, his weathered feet clicking on the floorboards. “We do not fight. We have disagreements.” The lights on his forehead dimmed, but then flushed bright as he turned his faceplate toward Genji. “I heard I am lazy,” he said, voice deepening in amusement. “I will do my best to correct this impression. Good morning, Genji.”

 

“Yo,” Genji returned sourly.

 

“Does my presence still displease you?”

 

Genji leaned back into the wall, stretching one leg out till his ankle hung off the mattress. He rubbed the back of his thumb on his helmet crest, two hard pieces scratching together.

 

“It is just that you are very kind,” he said. “And I have not figured out what you want.”

 

“Today, I wanted to see if I could help you rest.”

 

Genji waved his hand at the mattress. Zenyatta followed the gesture. He opened the back shutter to the daylight. “I suppose I meant sleep, as we do. Rest your mind.”

 

“I _can’t_ ,” Genji snarled. “Go away.”

 

Zenyatta paused mid-sweep. He had only gotten one row of the floorboards clean. His head reflected snow and sky on one side, the dark loft and the green glare of his guest on the other.

 

“Alright,” he answered softly. He closed the back shutter, walking across the room and propping the broom on the wall. He left, footsteps vanishing off the walkway.

 

Genji crawled out the back and hopped to the roof, searching for the interloper. Zenyatta was so slow he was only just touching down from the upper walkways, but he was not lurking or waiting for the cyborg. The omnic floated toward the path up the mountain, and Genji watched the sun move bright across the panels of his body till he left the stony face.

 

* * *

 

Water splashed into the wooden troughs, gurgling as the buckets emptied.

 

Genji followed the sheep shearer and the old woman. His frame drew out finger-like shadows as they led him, a rooftop oni, east into a rosy dawn. They secreted into a single-story building, and Genji dropped from the sunlight to find a window he could peek.

 

Human and machine sat on stools beside a cadre of looms and sewing spindles. The woman was supervising again while the omnic threaded strings of wool together. She pointed at his canvas, and he picked out a knot of fluff. He analyzed the remainder of his current section, and retrieved three other flaws of soft jetsam. Leaning over, he whispered something to the woman that made her round, wrinkled face pinch in delight, and her chest wracked out gasps of laughter. Genji studied the omnic’s work: golden yellow cloth he was stitching together with oiled plant fiber. He decided it was a pair of the baggy pants the Shambali all seemed to wear.

 

When he left, the two of them were still working. Genji walked out into the light of the main street, visor rising at the sun in the east. He polarized his visual feed and stared into the heavenly artifact. The old woman giggled again in the sewing house, and Genji dropped his head, picking his way down the street of the quiet village toward the loft.

 

The village signs had a script over them he could not read, except to think it was different from the symbols used in Cairo and the other cities by the river. He thought he might have seen it before, sometime ahead of his last Children’s Day. He held the side of his helmet as he walked, tapping the shells of his fingers on his buried temple. The sunflower smell of dye gave way to the brewing earth tones of vegetables, carried across the purified wind like an arrow. Genji climbed a semi-covered staircase to follow the odor, finding himself across the walkway from another building with an open door.

 

Candles stocked a table in the far corner, the room otherwise relying on the sun. Banners draped through the top of the doorway, fragmenting daylight across soft yellow walls. Tables of dark lumber defined communal dining, and a couple squat stone ovens occupied the same space. Genji could not decipher the stoves’ design: they used wood and fire to cook, which already made them different from anything in Hanamura.

 

With a jacket tied around his waist, a man stirred a stewpot on one of the stoves. The pebbled tan skin running out from under his red t-shirt sleeves reminded Genji of Jesse. This man had clipped black hair under a far more modest patterned cloth hat. Genji’s shadow cut plain across the wall, and the man turned a mustached face to him. He was much shorter and older than Jesse was, or maybe everyone in the world had gotten older. The year listed in the calendar app always surprised Genji.

 

The man muttered his unknown language, but followed up with a gesture, waving his arm out, and back in to himself. Genji did not know how to refuse. He approached, another shield compound tickling around his armor as he crossed the threshold. He was immediately handed the soup spoon. The man waited for him to stick the business end in the pot, then pulled on his jacket and left.

 

Genji wrapped and unwrapped his fingers from the spoon handle. He turned the scoop clockwise, counter-clockwise, unsure how the vegetables should gather on the surface, how the broth should bubble or lie smooth. When he lowered his head, the stew breathed in sweet.

 

Resting the spoon in the pot, Genji touched the front of his helmet, white fingertips blurring into the feed of his visor pane. The newer model faceplate released, a ping of air in his ears. He palmed it away onto the table, blinking at the rich colors of the vegetable swirl below him before detaching the secondary guard Angela had installed over his nose and mouth. He pressed his lips together, and stroked the flesh of the part, only to flinch and pull off.

 

The cyborg took his time to assemble another scoop of broth, greens hanging off the side, hints of white squash peels brightening the center as flecks of carrot textured the edges. He got it to his mouth smoothly by pretending the handle of the spoon was the hilt of a sword, blade cutting into his mouth. He just blundered through the actual drinking as the heat touched his lips, traces of broth down his chin as he choked preemptively. He squeezed his eyes shut, focused on the shapes of the vegetables, and ingested properly.

 

Saltier than he expected. Some kind of ferment or dill herb tingling in his nose, a few blots of rice grain hiding below the broth surface. He rested the spoon handle on the counter and ran his tongue over his lips, chin dripping. Genji swallowed, and felt the heat of it down his neck. His chest mimed deep, reviewing breaths.

 

The original cook’s footsteps knocked along the walkway. Genji dropped the spoon into the pot and sought the metal spout beside the stove. He dripped water into his hand, slapping his palm to his lips, swallowing and running his soaked appendage over his jaw. He hunted for a towel, but found an opened net of vegetables on a cutting board. Hanging out of the neck was a tomato.

 

It was red. The shape was not swollen and symmetrical like the engineered kind. It had probably taken a long time to grow. Genji moved his hand over it. A weird ring polluted his audio stream, an unending triangle tone. He made a fist around the jellied mass, and turned it up for inspection. It was fermented and smelled like ocean grass, skin bruising in his grip. Genji was only trying to probe into it, but his fingers clenched in spasm and the tomato erupted, covering his armored wrist in pink pulp. Seeds and strings of cortex bubbled out of the center, and suddenly he could not hear anything but the senseless bell in his ears.

 

His fingertips kept digging into the gushing viscera while he struggled to relax his hand. When it happened his fingers popped open like broken claws, ruins of the tomato releasing to the floor with a wet _plap_. Three shuriken rolled out through the red lace stuck to his hand and his fingers snugged them in automatically to their designated notches. Genji leaned his weaponized appendage on the counter, the air full of cooked vegetable odor and the crisp daggers of light off the snow. He could feel the kitchen’s stink all over his face.

 

Smothering, he covered his heart with his clean hand. But when he looked down his chest was covered in blood anyway, streaked and speckled down his belly like the exploded pulp of a dragon's hunger. Genji’s lips gaped, his eyes flashed up at his surroundings, and the burning brilliance of the candleflames earned a swipe of his weapons, wax and wicks tumbling to the floor and smoldering in the wood. The stars embedded in the wall. The smell stayed with him. He lashed his arm across the stovetop, slamming the stew pot onto the floor.

 

Choking the water spout, he pulled out its throat so that water gushed around his feet. He slammed a fist into the iron stove ring, and darted back when a jet of flame erupted around his arm. A multi-armed shadow bloomed on the wall above the stove. Genji whipped to face the monster.

 

The cook stood there, Zenyatta floating at his side. The lights on the robot’s head strobed rapidly. The man yelled in his unknowable language and stepped under the doorway banners.

 

“ _Stop!_ ” Genji screamed at him, lunging. Zenyatta interposed and caught Genji’s arms, one wrist in each hand, head tilting at the fingers covered in tomato. Genji could not pull loose, or push forward. The floating legs made a poor target for kicking, but he got one good kneecap before other hands tucked around his back and arms, wrestling him to the floor.

 

The lights on Zenyatta’s head were still blinking, but then all Genji could see were metal arms and faceplates. Pipe froth splashed against his pinned flanks. The hands restraining him were all warm. He could feel palms, fingertips sinking into the red-gray matte of his body. He thrashed.

 

“It is alright, Genji,” a female synthesized voice swore to him. The omnic that had taken his hand at the landing pad.

“We are here.” The sheep shearer.

“Calm down.”

“We are with you.”

“You are safe…”

 

All machine voices, all in Japanese. His vision blurred, he could smell burning wood. He saw Zenyatta throwing a soaked towel over the fire across the room, but someone was still holding his hands. The cook was next to Zenyatta, stamping out the little flames with his boot. He returned first, and Genji turned his face away as the boot neared. The man exclaimed in his language and dropped to one knee. He laid his bare hand under the crest of Genji’s forehead guard, over his eyes.

 

Genji froze at the contact with his scarred skin. Zenyatta said something in the other tongue, and the man pulled away. The Master floated over and lowered himself almost to the watery floor. Then he landed, knees in the mess, bending over.

 

“What is wrong, Genji?” he asked, his hand fanned on the air over Genji’s face. Gray eyes snapped between the etched circles in the metal palm, the state of the room, and his faceplate still resting on the countertop. He glanced at the chrome hands encircling his shoulders and chest.

 

“Going to tear me apart again?” he groaned back, but the omnics only held him down, one rubbing his shoulder. Tears ran out of his eyes and salted his lips. “This is not me,” he told Zenyatta. “This is a machine.” The hand restraining his had locked fingers with him. He curled his digits against the other adamantine shell. “Why can’t I escape?" he begged. "Why is he still everywhere?”

 

“We are here for you,” a synthesized voice reiterated.

“The Iris embraces you,” said another.

 

Zenyatta waited. Genji swallowed, throat cold. He could not remember what the soup tasted like. The human in the room clanked a tool against the water pipe, struggling a while before Zenyatta nodded to one of the others, and she rose to assist. The flooding stopped. Genji’s cheeks burned as the wheezy pants of his synthesizer flushed into relief against the still air.

 

“You may release him,” Zenyatta said to the others. Genji turned his face into the slick of water sludging the wood. After a few minutes, Zenyatta raised his head to the other omnics. Their stalky legs departed the kitchen with taps of hardened feet, pant-legs ruffling as they passed the thermal shielding onto the walkway. Zenyatta looked at Genji. “Get up,” he suggested.

 

Genji propped himself on his elbow, blinking at the white daylight outside the kitchen, and around at the evidence of his presence through the room. Zenyatta followed his investigation with shifts of his head. “Mondatta will wish to speak with you,” he said.

 

“I feel so stupid,” the cyborg growled, eyebrows twitching to a glare above pink cheeks. But Zenyatta had already stopped him from trying to disappear into the floor by getting him up. “What did that man want?” Genji laid his palm over the same spot, his chipped brow, resting his eyes closed under the hard plastic press of his own hand. Zenyatta looked at the cook, who was putting out the logs still burning under the dented stovetop.

 

“That is Dayahang,” he noted. “He did not realize who you were.” Zenyatta passed his hand toward his own silver forehead. “He thought you might have a fever. He did say you were warm.” He got up when Genji did, floating off the floor, stains patching the knees of his pants. Genji went for his mask. Zenyatta picked up a folded towel from one of the tables and laid it next to the pieces of armor.

 

Genji selected the terrycloth first, wiping his face and mopping the red juice from his hands.

 

“Why were you with him when he came back?”

 

“When I could not find you at your residence, I asked him to watch for you. I thought you might be drawn to the scent of his cooking. As to the reason of my visit: I came to sweep, but I need your permission.”

 

Genji fit the lower guard over his face, and stared at Zenyatta over the metal with half-lidded eyes.

 

“I’m tired.”

 

“Of course.”

 

Dayahang returned from an excursion outside, more tools in his hands. He dropped them on a table so he could approach Genji. The cyborg straightened, but Dayahang only thumped his arm before returning to his work.

 

“He is so calm.”

 

“He has seen this before. Come, I will accompany you to your quarters.” Genji followed the omnic out, looking over his shoulder at the man arranging his tools and surveying the torn pipe.

 

At the loft, Genji pulled open the shutter and rested his hands to either side of the frame. “Thank you for allowing me to walk with you,” Zenyatta prompted. “I hope you can rest comfortably. Would you like a blanket?”

 

“What drug do you have?”

 

“I do not understand, Genji.”

 

“To help me sleep.”

 

“I am afraid I have nothing that would suffice.” Zenyatta bowed his head. “I wanted you to achieve it on your own.” He turned to gaze back down the walkway, a moment before Genji heard footsteps rising onto it at the other side. “It seems he is already here.”

 

Mondatta’s white faceplate came around the upper court of the common building, yellow robe and brown torso-crossing sash camouflaging him better among his fellow Shambali. He still never looked quite right on his own, like his pristine metal might fade if no one was there to adore it. He stopped beside Zenyatta, glancing between the two of them before he held up his palm to the other omnic. Zenyatta repeated the gesture, only with the usual circle of his hand in the air. Mondatta tilted his head, echoed the orbit uncertainly, and dropped his arm. Genji realized he was wrong: Mondatta had as many old scratches on his frame as the other robots.

 

The Shambali leader’s face turned to him, flush with golden inlays.

 

“Greetings, Genji.”

 

“Hello,” he muttered back.

 

“I was in the neighborhood,” Mondatta explained, synthesizer rising in good humor.

 

“Am I in trouble?”

 

“No.” Mondatta advanced until Genji scooted out of the shutter frame to make way. Mondatta’s white sandal did not cross the threshold. He surveyed the interior from the doorway. “But some structure may be of use to you. I would like you to not be in this room anymore…” He spotted the broom leaning on the wall. “Except to clean it in the morning, and to rest in the evening. For my brothers and sisters, bedtime tends to be around 8PM, and they get up at 4:30. Please consider those the hours which you may spend in this room, with a half-hour to make ready each day.”

 

Zenyatta nudged closer to the conversation, but Mondatta cautioned him to silence with a lifted hand. “We devote parts of our day to assisting the villagers with whatever they need. Would you like to help Dayahang repair his restaurant?”

 

“It was my fault,” Genji allowed. “But I do not understand them.”

 

“Our friends speak Nepali. I will ask Zenyatta to teach it to you.” Mondatta turned and touched Zenyatta’s upper arm. “Starting tomorrow morning?”

 

“Yes,” Zenyatta agreed softly. “Genji said he was tired now,” he advised the other omnic.

 

“Then call this your last day in bed,” Mondatta replied smoothly, lifting his chin at Genji. “Is that agreeable?”

 

Genji nodded weakly at the white plate. “Very good,” Mondatta said, and tilted his head at Zenyatta. Zenyatta peeped up at him, and then dropped his head in a kind of nod too. Mondatta touched the back of Zenyatta’s skull, just above where the red wires fed into the processor case.

 

“Thank you,” Genji murmured. Zenyatta looked sharply to him. Mondatta’s focus transferred more gradually, out of propriety.

 

“You are very welcome,” he said. “Peace be upon you, Genji.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : Castle in the air.  
> 
>   * Next chapter: the quest to not name any other Shambali...continues???
>   * _oud_ : a pear-shaped string instrument
>   * When I was googling future!planes I discovered some good news: there's a concept jet that can fly from NYC to London in about 30 minutes! The bad news: it's not going to go from concept to production for at least another 15 years.
>   * It is really interesting to translate videogame maps into "actual" locations. I think the most helpful thing I did was made a custom no-cooldown game and flew around the target map with Pharah, then kept it recorded as a reference. The Overwatch Visual Sourcebook keeps pretty mum about the origins of the map design, so google as always is an ally.
>   * #genjibeforeedgeboostnerf
> 



	9. Clockwork Dreams

 

4:30AM.

 

The time blinked yellow in the corner of his visor feed.

 

Genji cycled on his integument lighting, took a deep, ambitious breath, and dragged himself off the mattress.

 

An uncertain stasis in the middle of the loft floor ended when he pressed to the back shutter and opened it wide. Sleeping sunlight caressed yellow up the handholding mountains, fostering a pale purple glow in the lower sky. Genji stepped out on the walkway and crossed his arms over the railing, watching the star’s steps toward awakening. He looked over his shoulder for the bright pennants of the castle in the sky, but all he saw was a square of light cutting into the loft, highlighting the broom propped on the wall.

 

He returned inside and seized the handle. _Gotta take care of your house,_ his brain parroted at him in a fond drawl. Genji’s fist clenched on the broom. He attacked the remaining dust bunnies, pulling up his mattress one-handed so he could get underneath. The sleeping katana and wakizashi he transferred to the chair the omnics had brought him, surprised to find the swords’ long bodies left shadows in the dust. With a few swipes of his broom, he cleansed the trace of their bones from his resting place. He put the broom out back.

 

4:40AM. Genji decided to try and find where the omnics kept their bathhouse. He could strip the wood grain he still smelled on himself from yesterday. If cleaning up was a pastime even for machines, maybe he could wash his sheltered face, or his hair. He could recall doing it even before he started getting blood all over himself. He played back jazz audio captures from Jesse’s phone while he hunted around the village.

 

Water splashed inside houses that smelled like humans, voices tangled behind walls in Nepali. He could not find anything a robot might use, but there were some blue canisters standing outside with faucet attachments. Genji opened one, just enough to fill his hand, and soothed the gift of water over the glowing circles on his shoulder. He repeated the gesture at his helmet, stomach, and legs. When he finished he was dripping, at least. He shook off the beaded water before it froze on his armor.

 

4:55AM. Returned to his loft, Genji opened the front shutter, doubling the light from the pithy showing of the rising sun. Five minutes later Zenyatta drifted up the walkway and found him seated with his back to his den. The omnic tried waving at him over a pile of tomes he carried, and ended up dropping everything on the walkway, a few ancient books escaping to the snow pack below. Zenyatta peeped over the railing in earnest to check the condition of the items furthest fallen. Genji hopped down and gathered the books in his arms, as well as a tablet. Aside from a few wrinkled pages, the artifacts survived.

 

The omnic collected everything fallen immediately under him, and held out his arm for the rest when Genji hopped back into view, but the cyborg shook his head. Zenyatta bowed awkwardly over his books, and they took the more traditional descent for the village commons. Tearstains of canister water on Genji’s legs reflected light from faded lanterns as they passed through a corridor.

 

“You look very nice today,” Zenyatta said.

 

Their destination was the wood screen building in the center of the commons. Not counting the vertical drop, they had moved about two meters from Genji’s front door. A frayed rug prepared the center of the room between opposing rows of blue and ochre cushions. Genji set down his share of books on the rug. Zenyatta followed suit, then closed the large sliding panels to either side of the building, and lit the candles along the walls with a glance. Despite appearances and the wax perfume, Genji decided the candles must be electronic. Probably safer, with the garlands of dried red flowers and banner cloths lacing the ceiling.

 

“Do the villagers go to sleep at the same time the omnics do?” he asked as he surveyed the hole-riddled wood screens to either side. Shrines decorated the patterned walls with candle cups and photos of humans and omnics. Not dead people, he thought-- hoped --as he identified the one-eyed grandma among them.

 

“Yes,” Zenyatta affirmed curiously.

 

“It’s a whole village of old people.” Genji plopped himself on a cushion, crossing his legs.

 

“There are several children, and significantly more young adults than elderly,” Zenyatta corrected. Genji stared at him, visor glowing. He pointed at the lock screen of the tablet the omnic had brought. It was branded with a trio of dots over a larger iris-like sigil, and ley lines trickling from the bottom lid.

 

“Is it a squid?”

 

Zenyatta laughed, an oscillation of wind chimes.

 

“This is the symbol of the monastery.” His hand floated over the tablet, which had handles evoking the tails of a scroll. He tapped the center of the symbol. “This is an eye.” He gestured at one of his black slots.

 

“Not one of your eyes,” Genji sniffed.

 

“We borrowed it. The image does share some resemblance with a squid.” Zenyatta turned his head at the brand. “…do not tell Mondatta,” he advised. Silver fingers drifted from modern tech to the books, covers dotted by snowflakes. “Our texts translate from Hindi, so I will rewrite them in Japanese for you. These with the red covers are copies of a basic dictionary.” Genji took one, letting it fall open in his lap.

 

“Nepali not a top twenty?” He touched his fingertip to the dog-eared title page. “This is paper.” He could make out the heavy fiber weave if he focused his visor. Pinching at the corner, he tried turning the page a few times, only to tear off the top quarter. Zenyatta leaned forward, examining the shaky fingers clutching the ruined flag of script.

 

“I will transfer the information to the tablet,” he suggested, opening his own copy of the dictionary with one hand, pulling over the squid tablet with the other.

 

He had no trouble turning pages.

 

Genji glared off through the wooden chain link of the walls. His attention dropped to the photo shrine. Zenyatta’s picture was snuggled up to Mondatta’s.

 

“Why do the others call you Master?” Zenyatta’s hands paused over book and tablet, slots and blue lights on Genji. “You ran away,” the cyborg hissed. “Is it because of your healing? Like that snake…” He leaned at the orbs suspended around the omnic’s neck. Zenyatta waited in silence. Genji touched the center of his own chest. “If you really can, heal the one in here.”

 

The robot reached across the carpet of books. Surprised by the responsiveness, Genji unshielded his heart, tensing on his cushion. Zenyatta grazed the black inlay, prodding the central green node with as many fingers as he could fit between the hooks of chrome pectoral plate nailed to Genji’s chest.

 

“Here?” he asked. His fingertips were warm. He drew them back. “Is it causing you pain?” Zenyatta sounded confused. “I do not detect any damage.”

 

“Make it like it was,” Genji spat at him. Zenyatta took longer to process this command, lowering his hand to his lap.

 

“You are the only Genji I see.”

 

“What good are you?” Genji sank in on himself, shaking his head into the shielding plastic of his useless fingers. The only reply was of gears adjusting Zenyatta upright, and the omnic closing his book. Genji looked up.

 

“Perhaps this can wait,” Zenyatta said. “Would you let me teach you sleep?”

 

A ragged sigh buzzed out of Genji’s synth. He dropped his chin at his chest. Circular shadows rippled across his faceplate as the spherical carvings around Zenyatta’s neck streamed to new stations beyond the glinting webwork of his shoulders. The omnic flexed his arms outward, touching thumb and index fingers together over his knees.

 

“That looks like meditation,” Genji scoffed.

 

“I see you have been introduced.”

 

“My father taught me. You are not supposed to sleep. That is what you get yelled at for.”

 

Zenyatta chuckled.

 

“And what did you find _was_ the purpose?”

 

Genji flapped his hand open to the air, leaning his head left.

 

“‘Empty your mind’, something like that?”

 

“Hm.” Zenyatta’s lights dimmed. “Let us begin by seeing that you are seated comfortably.” Genji looked around the cushions, tightened the cross of his legs, and shrugged. “I would like you to place your hands at rest.”

 

“Want me to make that?” Genji poked his thumb against his fingers.

 

“Is there a gesture that feels natural to you?”

 

He searched his hands, and moved the first two fingers of his left hand in front of his chest, resting his right hand over his knee. Zenyatta imitated him, his backwards reflection, adjusting the bend of his right elbow after further observation. “Very well. Please deactivate your visual feed.”

 

Genji dissipated his visor light to a green simmer, but left the feed active. “I do not want you to avoid thought,” Zenyatta continued after a moment. “Do not ‘empty’ anything. Consider your mind something to be experienced, not denied.” The blue glow from the omnic’s indicators remained bright. His voice was warm and assured, solid enough to hold onto. “We observe the thought, and let it pass. We do not stand in the way of a river.” Genji flinched.

 

Father, lowering a stone wolf to the earth. Genji, placing the pot in the shallow depression before it. Brother, using his hands to cover it with soil.

 

Genji’s arm wavered. He adjusted the grip of his fingers, less casual greeting and more sigil, like a kanji character, or a squid. Zenyatta modified not on sight, but a minute later, correcting the frame of his metal body to better reflect his student’s.

 

Hanzo held up a plant blooming with robust sawtooth leaves, but the tuberous white roots dropped maggots as they left the ground, and jewel-aquamarine gnats circled the stem. “ _Crash test dummy,_ ” he jeered in English. “That’s what you are.”

 

“Let it pass,” Zenyatta instructed.

 

As the sun clocked halfway to the center of the sky above, the robot unspooled his airborne rosary to a looser congregation, folding his hands to his lap as he raised his head. Genji dropped his posed fingers. “I promise it works better if you close your eyes,” Zenyatta said, and Genji stiffened. “Let us begin each morning this way.”

 

“Shouldn’t I do it before I go to bed?”

 

“No, here alone is where we will work. Go to your room only to attempt sleep, as Mondatta said.” Zenyatta stretched his fingers toward the tablet. “Do you feel prepared for this now?” The tablet screen displayed a line of Japanese under a sample of Nepali script. All the characters were printed in perfect mechanical neutrality.

 

“I knew it,” Genji muttered.

 

“Would you prefer a different font?” The characters altered their aesthetics in predictable synergy beneath Zenyatta’s hovering fingers. “This one was the most commonly used for Net messaging in Japan over the past three years.” Genji uncrossed his legs, clicking his elbow to a raised knee and couching his chin in his palm heel.

 

“Have you never written anything by hand?”

 

Zenyatta looked down at the tablet, and the book beside it. He extended one finger, pressing the tip to the tablet screen. He drew out the hologram of a pen. The line of precise Japanese vanished as he tugged the tablet closer to his cushions, bending forward to scribble on it.

 

Genji lifted his head off his hand as the omnic, just a little airborne, conducted the translation by hand. “You don’t-- I was just giving you a hard time.” Zenyatta glanced up at him, the corroded smile on his faceplate winking. “My father showed me a way of writing like this, but I never ended up using it much. It is not important.”

 

He resigned himself to the increased translation time when Zenyatta began reading the words a few seconds after writing each one. Laying across the cushions on his side, he dutifully raised his head every time the robot showed him the screen with a newly finished word.

 

“‘Accident’,” Zenyatta announced after a few minutes of similar efforts. Genji snatched his wrist before he could swipe to the next panel. Straightening off the cushions, the cyborg pushed the other books out of the way and grabbed the side of the tablet, turning it toward him to be sure. “…I drew the character wrong,” Zenyatta realized simultaneously.

 

Genji pulled himself over to the omnic’s side as Zenyatta laid the tablet down in front of him for correction. The hologram pen dissolved from his hand. He smudged his finger onto the edge of the final character, fingertip acting as an eraser. He did not redo the entire character, but lazily scrubbed off the wrong embellishment and doodled in the correct one. It was still not perfect. The word looked like a fingerprint.

 

Zenyatta picked up the tablet by its unconventional handles and lifted it toward Genji for approval. “Thank you,” he said as Genji stared at him. “Please tell me if I make a mistake again.”

 

Genji could not help it. It built on his hidden lips. He laughed.

 

* * *

 

2:04PM. The Shambali sister with the inverted septet of lights approached him while he was sweeping the floor of Dayahang’s restaurant. She held out both hands to him, a green pouch of candied aromas balanced on her hard metal palms.

 

“Genji, would you try this for me?”

 

Genji at first held the broom by one hand and extended the other sharp as a child, but changed his mind. He leaned the broom on the wall and took the pouch from her with both hands. She nodded and he undid the pouch knot, minty fabric falling away from a trio of fish-shaped dumplings in a tin.

 

“Did you make this wrapping?” he wondered, lifting the large stitching with his finger.

 

“Yes. We received a gift of cotton recently, and this was my share to craft with. I hope…do you like it?” The color was a pale echo of his visor light. He nodded, and took the dumplings to the countertop to transfer them to a plate. “And, would you share the sensory data with me?” the omnic asked, peeping over his shoulder as he detached the eyeframe of his faceplate. He blinked at her.

 

“Share the data?”

 

“Did…did the Master not teach you yet?” Her lights fizzled, popped bright again. “Message me when he shows you how, I will cook something new for you.”

 

“Do you still want me to eat this?”

 

“Of course! I made it for you.”

 

Genji’s eyes softened at the machine, his brow relaxed, and he removed the lower half of his faceplate. He searched the counter drawer for an appropriate utensil. “You can use your hands,” the omnic offered, flitting hers up to her mouth seam. Genji glanced at her, then washed his hands and picked up the first dumpling. He shifted his weight so she could stand at his side, turning the fish of powdery dough around between his fingers. He hesitated out of experience, shoulders ticking up.

 

The omnic watched him, and shook her head. “Oh, I did not think! I am sorr--” Genji separated one hand from the dumpling and laid his finger over her mouth seam. Her lights glowed. “Are you muting me?” she whispered. Genji dipped the dumpling’s flank into his mouth and tore out a bite. The contents of the dough were buttery, warm, and crunchy with seeds. With his cheeks puffed full of dumpling, Genji smiled close-lipped at the Shambali.

 

“You really made this?” he asked after he swallowed, dropping his finger from her faceplate. Only he had left a smear of flour on her metal, and retrieved a hand towel to wipe it clean.

 

“We cook often for our friends.”

 

7:13PM. Genji did not ever see Zenyatta during chores, or at night. The omnic was a phantom appearing only with the sunrise.

 

It was a hunt.

 

Sunset rarely brought much else to look forward to: lying in his bed, waiting for the magic of meditation to bring him dreams. There was no rule against inhabiting the roof of the loft before bedtime. It was both high and far back enough that he had good surveillance of the long path down from the monastery. As the day faded, Shambali migrated down, usually in pairs if not larger groups, cables of red and yellow birds with gleaming heads. But not a single one that floated.

 

He slipped down and located a couple robots sitting outside their house, weaving bracelets for each other from pieces of cotton. Genji bounded up to them for interrogation.

 

“Currently he is staying…” One of them indicated a house at the other end of the village, close to the secondary landing pad.

 

“Thanks!”

 

Genji discovered a red two-story building. Knocking and calling did not yield Zenyatta, but the door swung ajar when he tapped too hard. Genji wormed through the part.

 

He almost slipped: the floor was polished cherrywood. Widescreen monitors gleamed on the far wall. Drilled dots on the sides marked the anchors of a stereo system. Genji switched on the lights with a thought, ensuring the shapes were not nightvision artifacts. Two white couches stood off over a glass coffee table. He pushed his finger into the cushions: expensive soft. The couch arms opened to coolers with water, tea, and rice ferments, circular pads on the end for instant-heating fluids.

 

Wrong directions. The only explanation. Genji stumbled around the honey-colored room, goggling at the embroidered squid flags on the walls. Pushing through a curtain on the east side landed him in a kitchenette of old, weathered tile. He opened the fridge: empty aside from a few bags of vegetables, more in the freezer. Jars of salted roots pickled on a chipped countertop. The landing for the stairs commandeered almost as much space as the modest furnishings.

 

Wooden steps had been reinforced by hand, a perfunctory mesh of plasmetal nailed underneath to prevent anyone from dropping through. Genji could not avoid creaks as he ascended. The top step let him off to a single spartan room.

 

The bed: a frameless mattress covered by neatly folded sheets and plumped cushions. A second mattress propped on the wall like his during the day. He opened the homemade wardrobe to find fresh Shambali tops and pants, mostly yellow but some cream, not a scrap of anything dingy or ragged. A window let moonlight through a wooden screen, and above that two dark shelves fixed to the wall.

 

The shelf closer to the window frame featured nine empty depressions. The upper shelf held nine ringed orbs. Genji rocked up on his toes, stealing one. If he pretended the luxury downstairs could be part of Zenyatta’s existence, did it mean he kept a spare array? Had he made a mistake the first time he carved them? The orb had a different pattern from the ones Zenyatta wore, an emphasis on interconnection of the etching lines, and raised rings that seemed like they might pop out if he manipulated them enough. The bauble tugged against his restraint, bobbled skyward, and slotted back into its niche. The wood of the shelves was inlaid with chrome beads and an air of electricity.

 

Otherwise, the room was empty. Numb, Genji wandered downstairs. He flicked on the monitors, all tuned to news streams. Two were in English. A blinker bar read _U.N. investigation shows peacekeeping organization manipulated by phony intelligence._ He blinked the monitors back off, discovering he had little patience for virtual reporters with dyed hair shouting over the ads and hashtag readouts playing in their side columns.

 

Did Zenyatta really live here?

 

8:00PM. Genji sagged onto one of the fancy couches with liquor in their arms. He could blame Zenyatta for making him miss his curfew. He pulled a cushion against his chest and locked his arms around it. He lowered the room lights without moving.

 

1:00AM. Footsteps outside. Maybe even Zenyatta tired of flight. Genji sat up as the lights came on.

 

“I am going to tell Mondatta on you--”

 

Mondatta was the one in the doorway, standing to his full height as he regarded his intruder. Genji raised his right hand just under his chin. “I was given wrong directions!” he coughed swiftly, wagging his fingers.

 

“You are looking for Zenyatta,” Mondatta concluded, stepping inside and shutting the door. “He will be along. You may wait here for him.”

 

“Thanks…” Genji watched the elegant Shambali approach a flawless wall. A panel lifted to yield a storage closet. Mondatta extracted a broom and began cleaning the floor.

 

“How is your understanding of Nepali going?” he asked in the subject language as he neared the couches.

 

“Good,” Genji eked out after thinking about the words. He arrested his hand over the top of the broomstick. “I can clean the rest,” he volunteered in Japanese. Mondatta’s faceplate tipped at him.

 

“And the snow on the porch?” he wondered.

 

“Okay!” Genji secured his hold, though Mondatta had yet to loose the tool to him. “You are supposed to be sleeping,” he scolded, and the lights on Mondatta’s forehead pulsed, his synth rolling through a chuckle.

 

“You will achieve your dreaming too, I am sure. You are very capable. My brothers and sisters speak often and fondly of you." Mondatta looked down the broomstick, then across the ornamental room. "I apologize if I seem a hypocrite.” Genji shook his head, pulling on the broom. “There is so much to do to manage them all.” Mondatta finally let it go. “Thank you,” he sighed. “Good night.” He passed through the curtain. Genji heard him creaking up the stairs.

 

Zenyatta floated out of the night while the cyborg cleaned the porch.

 

“Genji!” he exclaimed in pleasant surprise, the kind that sounded like he was close to a laugh. “Good evening. What do you require?”

 

“Mondatta was cleaning…” Genji noted stiffly, eyeing the tattered omnic.

 

“Yes.” Zenyatta’s voice settled into a comfortable sigh as he surveyed the decadence through the door. “He is receiving guests in the morning.”

 

“You don’t ever help him?”

 

“With the guests?”

 

“With cleaning.” Genji brandished the broomstick at the floating Shambali. Zenyatta wrapped his hand around it. “Lazy!” Genji snapped.

 

“He let you take over?” Zenyatta tilted his head at the broom. “He prefers a state of control.” He applied the brush to the porch and scooped some of the snow off, lowering his faceplate toward the work. “What did you need?”

 

“Um,” Genji’s outrage extinguished as he watched the small omnic putter around the stoop. “I was asked-- she wanted to know how some food tasted. ‘Share the data’.”

 

“Do you remember the personal network Mondatta had you activate? You would need that function,” Zenyatta explained as he cleared the porch.

 

“Do you think it would be bad again?” Genji lowered his voice.

 

“You have only become stronger.” Zenyatta looked up at him, blue lights bright with encouragement. “I am here.”

 

Genji breathed out, shaking his shoulders. “Do not make a ritual of it,” Zenyatta warned as he went to deactivate his visor feed. “You will give the sensation more power than it deserves.” Genji glared at him for the interruption. Zenyatta rested the broom handle against his shoulder, crossing his arms over it, observing his guest. Genji closed his fingers to his palms a couple times, and peeked into the connection. The friend requests had all expired, and the network streamed over his processor in silence.

 

“Oh,” he blustered. “They are all asleep.” He hunted for the nearby node that felt like Mondatta, and sent the friend invite. He received a fat, white-faced avatar back with a _z_ over its head, and an automated response that his message would be processed in the morning. Genji touched the side of his visor. “Am I blinking?”

 

“You are a fast learner,” Zenyatta praised. “Try deactivating the optical effect setting.”

 

“Thank you,” he murmured as he quashed the effect. “Why do you Shambali not do the same?”

 

“I have always thought visual notation was part of our compatibility.”

 

“Right!” Genji did not understand any of that. He sent another request to his personal chef, receiving a silver _z_ avatar back this time, smelling birdseed and dough as if she was handing her gift to him again. He could not attach any data to his request.

 

“Can you recall the memory of what the food tasted like?”

 

“Yes. I recorded it…” Genji tapped two fingers to the chin of his helmet.

 

“Think of handing your recording to her like a trinket.”

 

“I can’t-- um, she is asleep.”

 

“Oh.” The omnic gazed absently off over the dark rooftops. “I suppose she would be.”

 

“Here.” Genji sent Zenyatta a friend request. “I will practice on you.” Zenyatta accepted, and sent him an emoji of a silver hand making a peace sign. Balmy warmth accompanied the gesture, touches of summer in the Nepali moonlight. Genji handed over the data recording. Zenyatta’s head rose, all nine lights aglow.

 

“How wonderful!” He touched the shiny fingertips of both hands to the seam of his golden jaw. “Your experiences are very beautiful, Genji.” A number of excuses ran through Genji’s head: it was just a dumpling, it was the cooking that made it so luscious rather than his artificial taste buds, it was just because omnics could not eat that Zenyatta thought it was special in any way.

 

Instead he said “I know” in cocky assurance, falling to silence after, unsure where the sentiment had popped up from.

 

“You will have to be careful. This will spread across our network, and all the Shambali will be bringing foods for you to try,” Zenyatta chuckled. He lifted the broom and knocked snowflakes from the brush with a few tempered chops of his wrist. “But now you have the tool, and I cannot prevent you from using it as you wish.” Genji nodded.

 

“Besides you and Mondatta, they remind me of little kids. So excitable,” he snickered. Zenyatta leaned his jaw on the side of the sturdy broom handle.

 

“Mondatta and I are the eldest…” he acknowledged with a vocal smile. “But only by a matter of minutes.”

 

“What are you?” Genji unfurled one hand toward Zenyatta’s scratched hull. “Like forty?”

 

“There are thirty of us now.”

 

“No, how many years since you were built?”

 

“It has been ten years since we were born.”

 

“Ten! But then you really are kids,” Genji protested. He lifted his shoulders. “Or maybe ‘lost boys’.”

 

“We are here with purpose, and not all of us are boys.”

 

Genji sighed.

 

“Ten years, but wasn’t the war…?” He paused, shook his head. “I am not good with history.”

 

“I can teach you,” Zenyatta volunteered. Genji chuckled, thumping the circular bolt of the omnic’s shoulder. Zenyatta’s etched spheres wobbled out of alignment, gravitating closer to the interceding arm. “Did you need anything else tonight?”

 

Genji shook his head. He was turning to leave, but studied Zenyatta over his shoulder.

 

“You are living here?”

 

“For now.”

 

Genji looked at the snow under his feet, then back at Zenyatta.

 

“We will still meditate tomorrow, even though you are up so late?”

 

“Of course, my friend.”

 

* * *

 

9:52AM. The sun rested behind heavy winter clouds. Genji released his focusing gesture early, breathing out in the gray light.

 

“What is it?” Zenyatta asked.

 

“You did not have to come back for me.” Genji activated his visor feed. Zenyatta cycled his arms free of his mirror gesture, relaxing his fingers out from his palms like he was releasing doves to the wind. He flopped his hands over his bent knees and raised his head, lights ticking radiant blue.

 

“I appreciate every opportunity to hear your thoughts.”

 

“Don’t you think I have better focus now?” Genji turned up his palm, making and unmaking a fist of his white fingers. “Maybe the sleep part is unimportant. I can reach Japan like this.”

 

“Is your business there sensitive to time?”

 

“In a way. If I wait too long, my opportunity may be taken by time. This place makes it difficult to keep track of the years.” Like Neverland. “And I do not want to forget what I have to do.”

 

“If you wish to go, I would be happy to accompany you.”

 

Genji sat up straight on his cushion. Zenyatta tilted his head kindly.

 

“You could…” the cyborg mumbled. The slow, drifting robot would be easily evaded once he landed on the island.

 

“As long as you are leaving for something important, and not because you are getting too many dining requests,” Zenyatta wondered. Genji laughed, holding up a finger.

 

“I told them once a week and they have obeyed. They even have to hold a drawing so the one who cooks is fairly decided.” He couched his chin against his knuckles. “I guess I have to wait until I have tried them all. And I need to pay you back, for helping me.”

 

“I do not require money.” Zenyatta lowered his head. “Or acts of obligation.”

 

“You will have to put up with it. I will teach you to defend yourself.” Genji made a gun with his hand, pointing it between Zenyatta’s eye slots. “That way when you are on your own again, you will not fall victim to another thing like me.”

 

“You are not a thing, Genji,” the robot insisted.

 

“And I will have no more burdens. You do not want to be a burden, do you, Zenyatta?” Genji’s voice sharpened.

 

“I do not think I am.” Zenyatta rested his hand to one of the books between them. “Is this teaching something you wish to pursue right now?”

 

“Let us make it a game.” Genji touched his mirror copy of the book. “You ask ten questions about Nepali, if I get them all right, I will teach you.” His visor glared at the omnic. “If I get any wrong, we will spend the rest of the morning with your books.”

 

“Very well.”

 

Genji did not miss a single question.

 

“Sorry I won,” he hummed.

 

“This is not a loss. You are an incredible student, to learn so fast.”

 

“Must be Angela’s software.”

 

“I would say what you lack is confidence.”

 

“We shall see if you still say that when I am done with you,” Genji warned as he got to his feet. “We need somewhere with more space.” He ran his hand flat along the air to indicate the ideal geography.

 

“I know somewhere that may be of use,” Zenyatta replied, rising off the ground. They collected their supplies, the pillows and books and the squid tablet, to one corner of the commons building. They pushed open the shutters on the walls.

 

Zenyatta fell in love with a yellow flower poking out of the snow on the main path. Genji walked on, only to return and poke the omnic’s shoulder to get him to lead the way.

 

“Maybe I was wrong, and you are the most child-like of them all,” he scolded gently, visor radiating a green smile. They walked up the mountain together, following trails of sandal prints past tattered banners and splintered frames of wooden fences. Snow detached from the earth to swirl around their feet, and drifted from the sky to stick to their shoulders and faceplates.

 

Pyramids and towers of faded red brick rose out of a plateau at the top of the path, walls affixed with a typology of omnic symbols. The castle was still over Genji’s head, out of reach, its shadow weak as the wintry daylight that carved it.

 

In the distance hung a bell, brass and lonely over a divider. Genji scampered toward it, Zenyatta’s synthesizer inhaling on a thought, then letting it pass as he followed the exploration. Genji ticked a single shuriken out between his fingers and flicked it defiantly at the bell. _Tink!_ He leaped and landed beneath the divider wall. As he turned his helmet up, the reflected star clacked off his headguard.

 

Genji peered at Zenyatta to assess his affront. The omnic came around the corner already staring up at the bell. Genji crossed his arms. Zenyatta examined his posture, and the bell a second time. He flicked his hand in a flat, open-palmed gesture at the bell, and one of his hovering orbs tore free of its chain and veiled white, soaring up to strike the bell.

 

The bell gonged over the mountainside, and the sphere returned to Zenyatta’s side with a pale, fiery afterimage fading from its etchings.

 

“It was not made to be silent,” the omnic suggested.

 

“Who rang the bell?” a Shambali’s voice piped out of the building behind them.

 

“It is very peculiar…” murmured another apprehensively, nearing the walkway to a view of the artifact. With a look at each other, Genji and Zenyatta escaped under the divider, past the monument of a saddled elephant.

 

“Ten years…you built all this?” Genji stood in front of a carousel of pillars and domes, the steps to a flowering red shrine guarded by animal statues. He surveyed some of the other buildings, patterning his fingers up an invisible roof terrace before his chest. Shades of Hanamura existed in the salmon rooftops.

 

“It took us around a year to find the village after we were born. Since then we have only refurbished existing structures. My brothers and sisters have made them their own.” Zenyatta examined a rope of omnic glyphs engraved on an external pillar. Genji squatted down in front of the lowest of the animal statues. He held out his hands and stroked the seams between the statue’s wrinkled bronze scales.

 

“The villagers do not mind?” He leaned forward and flattened his faceplate against the statue’s curved horn.

 

“They are no more sure about the monks who once lived here than we are. Earthquakes stole our friends’ history, but it may be that the monastery predates their arrival. They do not use it, so they gifted the upper plateaus to us. Mondatta negotiated with the government to establish it as a sanctuary.”

 

“He is pretty amazing,” Genji murmured. “What kind of creature is this?” He patted the statue he was kissing with his helmet. “A dragon?”

 

“A rhinoceros. It used to live in this country, and India.”

 

“Maybe it is a zoo animal now.” The cyborg flapped at another of the massive statues along the shrine’s fringes. “Like an elephant.”

 

“A zoo animal?”

 

“An animal that does not exist in the real world anymore.” Genji bopped his hand along the heads of the other statues-- man-faced lion and decorated horse --as he strolled up the steps to the shrine center, crushing red petals beneath his feet. He paused at the top step. “Is it okay?” He looked at Zenyatta. The omnic nodded, and Genji entered the shrine house.

 

Fires rustled above his head, streamed long and serpentine from the spokes of hanging braziers, potted plants made of lava. Zenyatta took a long metal pole from a catch on the wall to relight one of the braziers that had gone out, dabbing the pole-end against the lower candles for a firestarter. He undid his legs and stretched toward standing to complete the task, lean and spidery in the sunlight. Genji stared at the iris sigil on the center pillar, and a second symbol like a lotus or a flame beneath it. Real flowers ringed the pillar stand, rippling on channeled wind, loose blossoms tickling his feet.

 

He stole a rare white-blue flower with three petals. Zenyatta inhaled unsteadily, and Genji noticed green strings snapping apart from the flower base and the pillar stone. “Sorry.” The omnic floated around his right side and tilted his head at the lonely flower bobbing in Genji’s hands. “Where do you import them from?”

 

“Our friends bring them up from the valleys when they travel. Or Mondatta’s guests will bring them as offerings, and he carries them here.” Genji tapped at the undersides of the petals, half-expecting the blossom to fade from his grasp. “Originally there was just one,” Zenyatta noted, voice affectionate enough to draw Genji’s eye. “A man visited while we were struggling to reconstruct this area. We were mournful about the statues, we did not know if we would find enough to line the stairs properly, and if we would be gentle enough in cleaning that we did not mar the original art.” One of the massive, frozen elephants was standing in the distance behind Zenyatta’s face as he talked. “Our guest saw our uncertainty and left at once to the valley. He returned with a single flower in a pot filled with clay. It had a thermal shield so it did not freeze as he walked.” He motioned his hands around the oval shape.

 

Genji tried putting his kidnapped flower back where it had been resting, but the wind tore it from his inarticulate fingers and blew it away, off the mountainside. He folded his arms behind his head. Wind chime notes danced under the shrine’s bell ceiling, and he looked to the archways: lined with little bells, vulture feathers tied to the clappers. “The man placed the flower on this pillar and told us to watch it, so that we would learn the impermanence of things.”

 

“And it blew away?” Genji guessed.

 

“Everyone started gathering here every day to inspect it. We did not want it to go, it was very beautiful. Despite our desires, we were surprised when the flower did not wither, and discovered upon closer inspection that it was growing. It became the bed of red flowers here.”

 

“What did the man say?”

 

“He had already left, moving elsewhere on his own journey. We never saw him again.”

 

“Designer flowers are pretty hardy,” Genji dismissed. “I have seen them growing on rocks before.” A snowflake hissed through a brazier flame above. “Though it is so cold here…”

 

Zenyatta stuck his hand toward the pillar, silver fingers a breath off touching. Genji followed his lead, but made contact with the obelisk. Streams of warmth entered through his fingertips, and he drew back shyly. Rubbing his elbow, he lifted his chin at the orbs floating around the omnic. “It is like those?”

 

“It is a gathering place for our wishes. I suppose as long as Mondatta and the rest continue to visit, these flowers will always bloom.”

 

“Guess that man did not teach you the lesson he expected to,” Genji snorted. “You should bring that yellow flower you like so much up here.”

 

“It appeared content where it was,” Zenyatta sighed.

 

“It is in the middle of the path. Somebody is going to step on it for sure!”

 

Zenyatta pivoted his whole body around to face the outer world, shiny face tipping at the plateau edge, hands clenching to reflexive mudras. But he seemed to remember Genji, peering back. Genji shook his head. “Do you want me to walk back down with you?”

 

“I would appreciate that very much.”

 

When they neared the village center again, the omnic took a velocity of initiative, and the cyborg’s visor flashed as he quickened his stride to keep pace. Zenyatta reached low for the flower’s roots in the permafrost.

 

He stopped.

 

“What are you waiting for?” Genji asked.

 

Zenyatta withdrew to his seat, hands folding together, two forefingers matching each other and pointing heavenward, thumbs pairing at his chest. Snowflakes gilded the flower’s petals as the robot floated inert beside it.

 

“Perhaps it is the nature of impermanence that we must allow the end of things.”

 

“If you saw a man dying in the street, would you leave him alone?”

 

“…no. But this plant is not dying.”

 

Genji leaned over his shoulder, the flower darkened by his cat-eared shadow.

 

“I told you, someone is going to step on it,” he insisted, pointing. “Then it will die.”

 

“There are many possibilities.” Zenyatta drifted down to settle before the flower. “I must think on this.”

 

“Right here? Someone is going to step on _you,_ ” he grumbled. Zenyatta bowed his hands out over his knees. His rosary adjusted to a slow, even orbit around him.

 

Genji stalked around the omnic and sat down on the flower’s other side. “You are just trying to get out of our deal. I am going to wait right here for you.” He assumed the two-fingered gesture in front of his chest. “You cannot escape me.”

 

11:57AM. The weight of the snow began to wilt the yellow flower. Genji shook a layer off his shoulders. Zenyatta’s round joints and bald dome did not offer much texture for the weather to cling to, but Genji saw it bead at the corners of the slits in his face, and tumble off the flat golden lip of his mouth seam. The orbs rotating precisely around the robot rang softly on occasion, illusions of omnic symbology rising off their surfaces. “What is that for?” he asked, but could not trick the master from his meditation. Genji switched off his visor feed.

 

He envisioned the man who brought flowers for robots. In Genji’s thoughts, he dressed like they did, and his image passed in and out of a sun-colored cloak to keep him from freezing. Dashes of red marked the wells of his eyes, and dragon green tassels swayed from his ears. At first he stood before Genji with a scarlet blossom in one hand and a snake tail in the other, then he faded, and all Genji could find was the cloak by itself. Ragged and half-buried in snow, on a mountain without a name or a mechanical people to keep it in trust.

 

Genji drifted along the fateful snowbank no more material than a shadow, slithering around the hint of the wise man. Winds tore about him, casting down the white peaks but unable to snare him. He was a creature not of body but of cool, calm, existential flow, beginning to reflect color only as he thought to turn toward the yellow sunrise.

 

His visor feed irised open, metal chest rising with a stirring breath. The Earth had gone lopsided. His visor was cut off by a blurry stripe of pink yak wool tucked around his helmet. The skies too were pink overhead, though Zenyatta leaned into his camera frame. A blue blanket with flat red threads flapped around the robot’s shoulders, slipping off his arm as the wind toyed with it. Genji was still trying to understand why nothing was oriented correctly. Zenyatta spread his hand over Genji’s faceplate, and Genji examined the perfect circles inscribed on the palm that never touched.

 

4:36AM. He reached out from his blanket cover and seized one of Zenyatta’s fingers, dropping once he ensured it was solid. Genji propped himself off the snow. As his wooly blanket tumbled from his straightening arm, it revealed the yellow flower, so precisely caught in his sideward pitch that it had not been destroyed, merely sheltered from the snow for a time.

 

“I fell asleep?” he croaked, and squeezed the blanket over the top of his head. “In the middle of everything?” No one watched him but Zenyatta, but he still tugged on the sides of the wool, tightening its cowl around his face.

 

“Did you dream?” the omnic asked.

 

“Nothing I can remember.”

 

“I am very happy for you, Genji.”

 

Zenyatta’s face reflected the pastels of the new day. The snow bunched in his eye slots had broken into roots of water down his plating. Belated, Genji opened his eyes behind the visor pane, blinking slowly till he felt the suggestion of his own lashes.

 

The impromptu hood flapped around his helmet as he looked around. Voices bubbled in from the other side of the commons divider. Genji bent his knees closer to the hunch of his body, only to relax as the one-eyed woman and the one-light Shambali entered the area with baskets draped in their arms. The pairs of early birds exchanged greetings, and the Shambali noticed the flower in front of Genji, pointing it out to his elderly accomplice. She spoke, stony with irritation, as she crouched her stocky hips and swiped her fist around the flower stem, wrenching it free. All that remained was a flayed green stump. She tossed the flower in a basket of like blossoms and led her robotic friend off to the sewing house. Zenyatta canted his head at the devastated plant.

 

“I see.” He folded his fingers before the golden polygon in his chest. “Did you understand her words?” he asked Genji.

 

“Something about trash.”

 

“I am sure you know more.”

 

Genji glared from under his pink hoodie, and played back the audio capture of the old woman’s voice to himself, pairing the enunciations with his relevant memory packets from the commons building beside them.

 

“If she did not harvest it now, the two of us would destroy and waste it.”

 

“Very good.” Zenyatta framed his fingers around the jagged remnant of the stem. “It is still very beautiful.”

 

“If you say so.” Genji nudged the blanket off his head, allowing it to settle cape-like on his shoulders, a mirror of Zenyatta. “I fell asleep while meditating,” he complained.

 

“Are you prepared to redeem yourself?” Zenyatta teased. They moved into the commons building.

 

That night in his bed, Genji slept again, dreamless. Rather than returning to the shrine plateau, he practiced Nepali in the mornings with the omnic. The stump of the yellow flower browned and grew brittle, disappearing gradually from the path. He never discovered who had gifted the blankets, so he took his own and Zenyatta’s and sheltered beneath them when he slept at night.

 

* * *

 

4:27AM. Woke up imagining he could feel the blanket stitching, or sometimes the silk of his bed in the Castle. Woke up thinking he was skin instead of nanofiber. When the nights were not dreamless, they were mostly these faint, false impressions.

 

4:20AM. Brother telling him to get his lazy ass out of bed. Genji said yes and shut his eyes again. Zenyatta’s knock at the door woke him later.

 

4:30AM. Floating on his back in sunny waters. Silver waves churned at the break of the sky over his head. His body, naked and metal, wore the envelope of the ocean for clothing. Where he lay the water was still except for the droplets draining off his fingers.

 

2:35AM. He had skin and the blue dragon’s talons tore it open, but it was his brother’s hands that pulled out the gutstrings. Hanzo’s teeth severed his thigh, ripped his esophagus from his neck, split the cheek under his left eye in two. Brother sat up on his knees, spit out the unwanted chunks, and wiped his mouth with the back of his white training glove. Genji woke to a line of moonlight crept beneath the rear shutter of the loft. He swallowed with his empty throat, and rested the side of his arm on his head guard. He fell back asleep eventually.

 

12:17AM. After struggling to sleep in the first place, the loft shadows too mobile to readily ignore, Genji fell unconscious and quickly smothered. Flexible needles coiled inside him. Heat festered under the remains of his torso, where his stomach should have been but instead there was a palpating, boiling hot metal instrument. _Come on, come on._ Angela, standing winged on water, moving very little but for her eyes, which followed him through darkness. He woke up and grabbed the spare blue blanket, panting into the folds of it. He tore off his faceplate and buried the skin beneath against the wool, rubbing back and forth until it burned.

 

4:30AM. The wild river talked beneath him as he drifted between mountaintops. He was almost ready to sleep within the dream as he coasted free on the open air. Hanamura stood in the east, a pop-up picture book town filled with bells, playgrounds, and neon pixel lights. Genji settled for a clearing filled with forest birds, winding across but never quite touching the tree branches, secure in knowing the slightest wind could carry him away again. A kite, or a blade of grass, turning in the sun.

 

4:24AM. The arcade was filled with movie posters for a film festival he never ended up going to. He was playing a game, he had his hands on the controls, but he was distracted because the building was not playing its usual jangle of a thousand metal noises at once. Instead other patrons rambled in blurry, nonsensical English. They brushed past each other with loud scrapes of leather clothing. And in the distance one of those noises that played at both dog bark and baby scream teased him to investigate. Genji ignored it, remembering he had some film nerd to his right he was trying to impress so he could go down on him later. Though it was not like the guy cared about the game, it was more like a ritual to ensure they shared one hobby with each other aside from fucking. When he locked the high score and looked, the boy next to him was Jesse McCree. The American’s eyes were shadowed by his hat, but his rough mouth decanted half a toothy smile.

 

4:19AM. Instead of wool or silk it was hard tile bordering his cheek and cold porcelain under his hands. Dribbles of moisture falling into still bowls echoed hollow and circular through the stalls. The only cloth left between his legs yielded to determined fingers. Genji did not know he was awake till a synthesized moan startled him out of torpor. “Shit.” He twisted over to dive his chestplate on the mattress top, lifting his hips into the air. When he got his thighs to relax out of the posture, it was only so he could hump the featureless juncture of his legs against his own pinned hand. He rested his helmet on its chin, then on its side, then face down into the blankets. “Damn it…!” he growled weakly, the electric quivers of his body moving around like blood in his ears. The clicks of his armored crotch against his senseless fingers resembled some species of ancient clockwork.

 

Zenyatta knocked and called his name outside the door.

 

“Yes!” Genji squawked, collapsing the rigidity from his hips and sitting up on his knees, blankets wrinkled under his hands.

 

“May I come in?” the omnic asked.

 

“I need to go wash!” Genji explained, opening the rear shutter and jumping out. He escaped to his usual house-side water container, jerking open the faucet and splashing his hands. His fingers were already spotless, and he hunched up against the faucet, shaking out thin laughter.

 

Zenyatta intercepted him on a frenetic scamper back to the commons. Genji tensed, visor bright with irritation. The omnic wore a new pair of yellow pants, not a hole or hanging thread to be seen, though the ragged artifact of his cream hexagon robe still wreathed his waist.

 

“What did you use to wash?” he asked, tilting his head at the rivulets down Genji’s arms.

 

“There’s a blue…a blue barrel…” Genji thrust an arm behind himself.

 

“That is drinking water for the ones in the barn. After meditation, I will show you our baths. They are in the monastery.” Zenyatta led the way to the commons building. “I think you will find them relaxing.”

 

“Okay,” Genji swallowed.

 

9:32AM. His arm thumped out of posture into his lap. He lowered his head, laying his hand over his stomach as he studied his anatomy. It took a few more minutes for Zenyatta to relax his arms from their tranquil frame, drawing his spheres toward his throat as he looked up at Genji. The cyborg’s chest heaved in shallow flutters, and he spread his fingers against his abdomen, biting his fingertips into the plate.

 

“You are certainly preoccupied today, my friend.”

 

Genji shook his head, rising to his feet while the omnic left the ground entirely. Zenyatta held out his hand to the exit. Genji nudged open the shutter. He dug his toe at the spot where the golden flower had grown while he waited for his teacher to glide out. “Is it something you wish to talk about now?”

 

“You would not understand.”

 

“I could try. There is much to be gained in a journey even if the ending eludes me--”

 

“Maybe when you grow up.” Genji gave a push to Zenyatta’s bony spine to ease him on his way. Zenyatta peeked back over the glowing surfaces of his spheres. Genji shut the commons building door and jogged a couple steps to catch up with him.

 

“I am very fond of my many journeys with you.”

 

“We haven’t gone anywhere,” Genji chided, but finally felt like he could exhale.

 

“Right now, we are going…” Zenyatta tipped one finger at the sky.

 

“Funny.” Genji kicked a tile of ice off the path to the shrine plateau, stopping to watch it slide musically down the frozen mountain. It hit a hardlight barrier before any of the village rooftops, matter permitted through only once the energy field ground it to slow, tiny crumbs. Zenyatta did not take any interest in the attempted stone skipping, and Genji hustled briefly again to reach even stride with him. “How do we get from the shrine to the peak?”

 

“I will show you. There is a gate.”

 

On the side of the shrine grew a field of pale grass. A stone gatehouse bloomed out of the mountain, and the Shambali had replanted any weeds that grew on the path to it. The gate was wood, streaked yellow with old water stains. Zenyatta tugged one of the dented metal knockers to open the path. Another of the eye symbols had been etched over the gate frame.

 

The mountain breathed out around them as they walked inside. Genji’s feet tapped across the dry blue rock of the atrium as he volunteered to shut the door, closing off the sunlight. Floating electronic lights dappled the air, tiny and numerous as snowflakes, golden like the star they left behind. The air was heavy with the chalky smell of mineral water. Taking the sole exit into deeper catacombs, he followed Zenyatta onto gentle paths snaking around infinite pits.

 

Faceless bodhisattvas resembling stacked balls of clay guarded the coiled corners of the route. Genji analyzed the crevices and encrusted gems of the ceiling for bats; he thought he heard them singing sometimes, but he never saw any. The path forked into the rock, one way to the peak and the other a descent to the mountain’s heart. Zenyatta took the lower path.

 

“I thought we were going to the monastery?”

 

 “It may have been better to say the baths are below.”

 

“Guess I will never get there,” Genji hummed as he strolled away from the celestial avenue. The cavern lights switched to the form of floating blue discs, and he followed one with his helmet as he passed it. “Yo, Zen.” The robot turned to him attentively, floating sideways like a legless crab. “Does your head light up?” Zenyatta waved his hand uncertainly over his signal lights. “No, can you make the whole thing see-through?” Zenyatta shook his head, silence marking his bewilderment. “Too bad.” Genji’s voice gentled: “Is turning lights off rude to you?” He flicked his visor off in demonstration, and Zenyatta twitched. “You always get antsy when I do it.”

 

“Normally it would mean someone’s soul has left their body.”

 

“Oh…” Genji ticked his visor back on. Zenyatta gestured at his own faceplate again.

 

“Dimmer or brighter is the way we express. You are capable.”

 

“Yeah. The other way is good for sneaking around though.”

 

“Do you have to sneak around very often?”

 

“Well, not here I guess.” Genji’s visor flashed. “Or not that I have been caught!”

 

“How stealthy of you!” Zenyatta professed, bright with naked admiration.

 

They arrived at a tunnel with a ruffled ceiling. Genji heard water everywhere, soaked into the walls. Striated rock from pink to sandstone wormed in and out of view, lining the sides of an underground stream with opaque blue-gold water. A hardlight walkway shined above the stream, rippling as he stepped on it. He realized the cloudiness beneath the surface was puffs of ice.

 

“Pretty…” His white reflection dazzled off the water, fragmenting as the stream dotted out to pools and islands. A larger eddy swirled gently in the back of the clamshell room. Shambali lounged in coffin-shaped pools, filtering gates to either side locked with blue in-use lights shining. The nearest robot looked over at Genji's soft footsteps, waved at him, and transmitted data with a wink of his signal lights. Others scattered around the room turned, wiggling their hands. A couple of them remained still, heads balanced on folded towels.

 

“You may clean yourself in here.” Zenyatta indicated a crevice pathway to a side room. “I asked the others to bring some items that may be of use. I will wait for you here.” He settled beside the entrance. Genji followed a pearly wend of pathway, the white stone pebbled like turtle skin, and emerged in a cave embedded with modern tile scales, basins, and pails beneath faucets. No one else was inside.

 

A piece of paper with his name on it hung from one of the faucets. The basin held bags of cleaning supplies, some colorless and scentless but marked with the Japanese characters for a robot. There were also pouches of what he assumed was shampoo and conditioner, no branding but they smelled nice when he opened him. Whichever Shambali had brought the items simply drew a stick figure of a man on the side of those bags, with lines jutting out of his head for hair. The bath wash sat in a steely loofah and oozed out when he squeezed. There was a toothbrush, though the omnics had already given him one for all the tastings. It was one of those toiletries he was not sure his body demanded, but the first thing he did was stick it in his mouth anyway, giving the cleansing light a couple seconds to sterilize his mouth before he capped the brush and put it away.

 

“Do the villagers come here?” he asked Zenyatta when he emerged, a small towel looped around his waist and his helmet under his arm.

 

“No. This is one of our sanctums, but you are very welcome to it.” A Shambali sister rose from a nearby bath, collecting her towel from a suspended bar. Genji studied her naked crotch: it was formed from a gray pelvis and shielded by seamed plate. He turned around and squatted in front of Zenyatta.

 

“Give me your foot.” The omnic tentatively extended his sandaled toe, and Genji tried buffing it with one of the pouches of honey wax from the washroom. The scratches seemed a little dimmer after. “You should wash more,” he ordered. “You do not separate the male and female sides?”

 

“No, I apologize. We may separate a bath with a curtain for you…”

 

“It’s okay.” Genji pointed at his terrycloth hips. “I have my towel.” He grinned.

 

“Genji…” Zenyatta murmured as the cyborg picked out a bath and got in, hooking the towel and his helmet on the edge. The gates on either side closed and the LEDs ticked from green to blue. “Do you desire clothing?”

 

“Did you only think of that just now?” He waved a dismissing hand at the omnic. “Is my hair messed up? You don’t have any mirrors in there.”

 

“I do not think so.”

 

“I guess because it’s artificial. Be right back!” Genji ducked his head underwater.

 

The trapped river’s voice filled his ears, and crossed out the rest of the world. Warm water oozed from the gate filters and washed his scars. Genji slowly opened his eyes beneath the crystal of the bath’s surface, raising his back so that no part of him touched air or earth. Tails of black hair floated around the edges of his vision. Within that ebony frame, past the blanket of refracting light, the ceiling of the cavern glowed turquoise and gold. He smiled, expression faint and half-remembered, as shafts of colored light trickled across his armor. He surfaced, blinking earnestly at the blurry ceiling dreams.

 

Fields of phosphorescent vegetation blanketed the cavern sky. Genji tipped his head back, grabbing his towel and folding it beneath his hair. Zenyatta still hovered next to him.

 

“May I sit with you?”

 

“Yeah. Not sit, though. You would get all wet. Just stay up there if you are not going to pick your own bath.” Genji’s gray eyes narrowed at the omnic’s faceplate. “Afraid of being clean?” he challenged.

 

“I went last night. It would be wasteful.”

 

Genji leaned his head into the towel, pursing his lips suspiciously, but soon closed his eyes to rest. “Did you know a fish lives in the water here?” Zenyatta proposed after letting him recline a while.

 

“Oh? How does a fish get inside a mountain?” Genji chuckled. “I don’t believe you.” He glanced around himself through the clear bath water, lifting his elbows to search underneath.

 

“We lock the baths and restore the water rather than letting it touch them,” Zenyatta assured him. Genji snorted. “When we first came here, we actually found the river before the monastery.”

 

“That I can believe. But the river is full of ice, probably all year. A fish is impossible.”

 

“I can show you.” Zenyatta transmitted a video file. It was a capture from the omnic’s perspective, looking into the clouded stream. Fork-tailed bubbles of silver swam beneath the film of frost.

 

One fish rose to a clear patch by the surface. It had no eyes, and stubby pectoral fins not much use in steering. When the school swam it was a migration of bullets punched with the pink of their gills and lateral lines. Genji’s focus drifted up from the impossible. Other omnics stood around the edges of the water, but they did not wear neat Shambali sandals. Their feet were many-jointed talons, or other pointy, non-humanoid configurations. The video frame only went up to their knees, but it did not look like they wore clothing. The only sound was the river. He noticed the reflections of fluttering signal lights on the water. The timestamp data with the video was only a little over a year after Zenyatta said he had been born.

 

Genji dislodged from the side of the bath and sank down to his nose, eyes half-lidded, watching Zenyatta’s mirror image in the water.

 

“Hey,” he bubbled, and looked up at the omnic, or maybe just over his head, at the spirals of glowing plants. “I was just thinking that maybe what I see is not real, but you know what is truly there, so that’s why you always want to run away.” He peered over the bath rim at the other Shambali, but none of them flickered to different forms. “I can’t think of any other reason, and I have had issues with that before.” He scraped the side of his thumb across his cheek. "You saw."

 

“Not everything need be a dream anymore, my friend.” Zenyatta descended till he was propped on the bath edge by his own legs, new trousers staining with water. He held out his hand, and Genji tucked a few drowned fingers around it. “You can see the line between sleeping and consciousness. As for me, my only guess is that I am selfish.”

 

Genji’s eyebrows lifted. He curled against the side of the tub, silent. Zenyatta retrieved an object from the weave of his sash cord and held it out. “I will not run away from you, but I know you have your own desire to travel. This is for you. You may thank Mondatta, he spoke with his friends in the government.”

 

Genji took the object, a thin electronic card. _TEKHARTHA GENJI_ it said at the top.

 

“Your name?”

 

“It is a name taken by all Shambali. I apologize. We are not trying to presume, but they required something, and you are friend to all of us. This identification is only meant to allow you across borders more easily, you need not think of it as you. When you reach Japan, Mondatta can surely help you recover the correct information.” There was a blank space next to the name. Genji rubbed it with his thumb. “It requires a photo. Genji, if you do want to change the name--”

 

“You can take the photo. Only, wait till I put my helmet back on. I don’t want to look like a swamp monster.”

 

“I understand. And our engineer is visiting soon, if you wished to speak with him about any issues before you depart.”

 

Genji stared empty-eyed for a moment, and then wilted down into the water, releasing Zenyatta's hand.

 

“Angela is my doctor.” He looked into the empty hole next to his name on the card. “But, I guess an engineer might have something I can use to sharpen my swords.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : News flash from another world.
>   * I didn't throw the word in here but _Devanagari_ is a common alphabet used by both the Hindi and Nepali languages, as well as many others. The signs on the Nepal map are written in Devanagari, and one of the kitchens/restaurants is named after The Raven saloon from Indiana Jones. :P
>   * _bodhisattva_ \- a Sanskrit word used in Buddhism, with various interpretations depending on the school, but in the most popular and basic terms it is someone on the path to enlightenment who holds great compassion for others. A bodhisattva may choose to delay the state of Nirvana and be reborn over and over again in order to help other living things.
> 



	10. Speak to Me

 

He saw a man through the machine’s eyes. Hollering, thrusting his arm at the neon fog, pink hand boiled into a fist. One of his legs glistened, mechanical below the knee. He lunged and seized a broken bite of cobble, throwing it at the robot watching him. The video veered into the pavement as she ducked, squealing. Her view wavered around the man’s fist, which was back in the sky, and ticked to the child at his other arm. The boy, maybe four years old, was expressionless aside from his wide, all-seeing eyes. He wore a hand-embroidered sweater, _NO BOTS 4 LONDON,_ blood English on blue, text collapsing over his shoulders because his tiny chest did not have the room.

 

A tailored white shoulder staged into view between the man and the Shambali. She had to look up high to see past the steep back of the ant-like omnic bodyguard. The taller machine advanced on the man in her pearly suit, magenta lights tinting the mist in the street, the man’s projectile caught in her hand. The Shambali scraped pebbles off her head as human bodyguards joined the ant to make a barrier. Police officers in yellow vests watched indifferently from the street corner. Past the black, wet skyscraper glass in the sky, Overwatch ships drifted by like sluggish bullets.

 

Genji caressed the back of the seven-light monk’s head, just north of the connectors for her red wiring. He wrapped her and the other Shambali standing with him to his chest, and their arms paired behind his spine. A third voyager noticed the comfort and budged in beneath his elbow. Genji squeezed the three omnics, resting his faceplate upon the flock of bald silver heads, and glancing over them at Mondatta.

 

He was chatting with Dayahang, each of them holding the other’s shoulder. A couple girls Genji had seen scampering around the village before, mostly near and in the old woman’s house, stood by Dayahang’s leg. Shambali arriving from the monastery thronged around the meeting of Mondatta and the villagers, chattering to each other and the humans in rapid, jubilant Nepali. The ones who had returned with Mondatta from afar stood at the outer shell of the crowd, quiet like the three tucked in Genji’s arms, speaking when spoken to. Mondatta still sounded confident as he discussed their progress.

 

_karroten: Are you okay? Did something happen after?_

_Loch4n4: Nothing happened… It was sad. Everyone there has been driven underground. There is a lot of work to be done._

_Aakhaa: Mondatta did not seem sure of when we would be able to return._

_karroten: You can ask another to go in your place next time._

The Shambali sister turned the side of her face against Genji’s armor, signal lights burning steady.

 

_Loch4n4: I would not. It is a privilege to journey with the Master. He says I must learn._

_Aakhaa: He always brings her._

The extra Shambali who snuck into the embrace finally communicated.

 

 _010001010111100101100101: Genji, how to get Master Zenyatta to pay attention? To me?_ He had a slight pining in his message, and had a harder time working through the unicode components than the other two. Genji rubbed the layers of crimson cloth draped over his shoulder.

 

“I don’t know,” he advised, surveying the welcome party. Mondatta’s adherents joined the Shambali in greeting him-- omnics born apart from the monks, but who had come to live on the mountaintop just the same. No floating robots were in audience. “If even Mondatta does not command him, I have no chance of understanding how.” Loosening his arms from the trio, he wagged his finger, an idea on the tip. “Tell Mondatta to bring me along next time. I will scare that man away with my sword.”

 

The two brothers cooed in awe.

 

“I do not know how anyone could be scared of it!” one gushed. Genji’s visor flashed at him.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“It is so beautiful,” he praised. Genji sighed.

 

“You spend much of your time sharpening that blade,” the seven-light noted, her voice soft, contained. Genji stiffened his back, staring at her, her unmoving face fixed back on him.

 

“So that it is always ready,” he answered with a _tak_ of his knuckles to his white hip. She examined his hardened fist, and reached out to take it. She smoothed his fingers between hers.

 

“Come brothers,” she said, releasing him. “Let us reflect on the day properly.” The other robots bobbed after her as she began walking toward the monastery path. Her head craned back at Genji. “You are included. You do not have to be alone.” The green in Genji’s visor paled.

 

“Oh, I am not alone,” he stammered quickly at his toes. Her tone reminded him of Mondatta. “I am…waiting for Zenyatta. I need to yell at him for being late, his disrespect.” All three omnics were looking at him when he peeked up. Then the sister laughed.

 

“Of course. Teachers should learn from their students.”

 

“Yeah.” He backed up to the belly of Mondatta’s ship. The Shambali trickled away across the village. Zenyatta never did show.

 

The ship tuned its engines with hums and clicks. The ant bodyguard framed herself just outside the ship door, where she could hold her back and neck straight. When Genji looked up, her pink signal lights were locked on him. He realized her iron face had no slots like the Shambali. How did she see?

 

“You’re still here,” she buzzed in English, lowering a half-empty bottle of amber from her plating as she spoke. The bottle said _Old Glenwales_ on the side. “Good for you.”

 

“Have they ever thrown anyone out?”

 

“No…but they should.”

 

Genji tapped the nose of his helmet, but the ant shook her horned head.

 

“Just saying it should exist as a principle. That naivety is going to get them hurt.”

 

“Mondatta knows enough to hire you for when he is away.”

 

“And now he’s figuring out certain engagements require him to bring more humans and leave me on the ship,” the ant sneered. "The educational process is beautiful."

 

“As for the village, there is not anything here anyone from the world would want,” Genji insisted, ignoring the interjection. “Nothing that makes money.”

 

“You think so?” The bodyguard raised her chin. “Maybe you have become the same as them.” She dropped a glass stopper into the top of her bottle. “Run along home, pet. Don’t cause any trouble.” She tucked the bottle in a band on the inside of her suit jacket. The spikes on her head made coiled shadows down her face.

 

Genji sent her a friend request.

 

“I like your suit,” he added.

 

She rejected immediately, eye lights klaxon bright.

 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she growled, ducking under the doorframe to the safety of the plane interior. “I only work here.” She left Genji and his bright, cheeky visor behind as she secured the door, and motioned to someone in the pilot box. Mondatta’s ship took off in gliding silence, unfurling its thin wings and curving up through the sky. It disappeared on the other side of the mountains.

 

Genji was alone. He thought momentarily of his swords and the promises they kept for him, but shook off the impulse and went to find his teacher.

 

He discovered Zenyatta’s shadow on the shrine pillar at the plateau, descending sun drawing the outline ever more concrete. Genji rounded the pillar to meet the floating omnic, who was not cognizant of him until he inadvertently stomped a ring of fallen flowers by the stair edge. Zenyatta tilted his head at the red petals wreathing Genji’s feet.

 

“Pretty rude,” the cyborg chided. “Not even coming down to welcome him back.”

 

“Mondatta knows where to find me.”

 

“But people like familiar faces after they have been away.”

 

Zenyatta stretched through the fading sunset to pick a stamped petal off Genji’s toe. He raised it between them in his palm. The wrinkles of the crushed crimson whorl gave off a watery, rich scent, like a popped bottle of wine over a bubble bath. Genji’s protest at this change of topic metamorphosed into a deeper sniff at the destruction. As the scent faded with the wind, a staccato of vulture feather bells took over, ringing above his head.

 

Zenyatta mirrored his quiet, watching him as he looked up to the violet evening sparking on bronze metal. “…are there any more of those?”

 

“The chimes,” Zenyatta confirmed, his blue signals making an aura over his chrome face in the growing dark. “Yes, in the monastery. I can show you where they are found, if you wish.”

 

“Not now. Almost time for bed.”

 

“I see. Then goodnight, Genji.”

 

“Night, Zenyatta.” He could hear the gears in the omnic’s neck shift after him as he turned heel.

 

“Mondatta would prefer to see me now?” Zenyatta asked curiously.

 

“Of course, dummy,” Genji snorted. Zenyatta drifted up beside him.

 

“I think I will walk down with you. It is late.”

 

* * *

 

“Do you think the weather is nice today?” He was practicing his Nepali.

 

The dark brown yak snuffled at his faceplate, breath moist, sending numerical jumps through his thermal sensor.

 

Genji studied the flea-sized hairs sprouting off the white bubble of the yak’s nose. He poked the velvet seam in the center with his finger. The yak grunted, large nostrils channeling wind around his hand. When he did not pull away, the animal budged his mouth upwards to nip the intruding digit. He spit Genji out right away, tongue flapping against his lips. “Sorry,” Genji cooed. He opened the stall gate and tied a blue bell to yak’s furry neck. “Come on out.”

 

The yak tossed his head, dull horns cutting up the sunlight that breached the barrier shield behind him. His cowbell dinged and rattled. Genji retreated to the doorway, holding out both of his mechanical hands and wiggling his fingers come hither at the beast. “This way, Bhālē.” The yak stepped one black hoof out of the stall when Genji used his name, bell whispering as he decided to emerge the rest of the way to the village commons. The very fuzzy brown butterfly blinked in the blue light of the afternoon. “Alright!” Genji cheered. “Now we…” He did not know the right word. He lapsed to Japanese: “Exercise!” He waved his arms over his head.

 

They left behind an empty row of stalls, the other animals transferred to the valley for summer graze. Lonely Bhālē was still used by the villagers for transporting goods. Genji looped a rope and halter over his own shoulder, and let the yak lead the familiar route up the mountain, passing beneath an archway ringed with golden flowers.

 

When they reached the plateau edge, Bhālē puffed and stood still. “I know something you will like,” Genji thought aloud. He touched the animal’s shoulder to get him moving, and paced him to the gate of the underworld, leaning on the waterstained door as Bhālē goggled at the flowering weeds around the edges. This time of year, the Shambali had to put up a fight if they wanted to keep the grass from flowing onto the gate path. He imagined they would not mind if the yak mowed it down, a guided force of nature. Bhālē’s bell swung brassy knocks as he scooped up mouthfuls of grass.

 

The cyborg crossed his arms, steadying the rope and halter against his abdominal plate. Resting his visor a while, he kept track of Bhālē’s position by ear. As the wind kicked to life, he heard the cottony ruffling of the yak’s fur too, and the voices of wind chimes overhead. Genji raised his head to the little bells swaying above the shrine, frayed quill feathers dancing beneath their clappers.

 

Turning around, he walked backwards and looked up the neckbreaking wall of the castle above. He glanced at Bhālē, whose ears dangled placid around his hungry face, russet and white fur growing a genetic identification of _Y96B®_ on his powerful cheek. Searching the area, Genji twisted the lead rope around the banister topper of a staircase. He made a clumsy tie-off and hooked the rope to the halter, crouching to fit it around Bhālē’s head while the yak continued feasting. “You will not go anywhere,” he ordered.

 

Bhālē ignored him for the forage. Genji let himself through the door.

 

Humid traces of mineral water colored even the upper path to the castle. Trills of disjointed song poured in from a directionless distance: bells, or bats. The path narrowed to single file along a columnar rock face, just Genji and the hollow mountain gaping at the edge of his foot. When he extended his hand to the precipice, his fingers grazed a hardlight rail that rippled and bent on the intrusion, preparing to catch a supposed careless traveler. One of the faceless bodhisattvas stood in jaunty repose in a niche along the column wall, hip popped out and a hand extended. Someone had tied a bracelet of seed shells to the statue’s naked wrist. Genji swept past, jogging even. Ritual beings reminded him only of Hanzo.

 

Wind flowed between the joints and crooks of his armor. He could hear it make a flute of him, intense even though he had not neared the top of the mountain. He activated a pressure gauge, and hunted the gale. The wind led him to a ramped corridor. A sagging roof of stalactites coursed opalescent and spiny over his head like an upside-down river clogged with shipwrecks. Clumps of red jewel moss glowed around primitive upheavals in the rampway, fetal flowerbeds coating half-grown pillars. Genji approached a fissure in the wall, holding his hand out before him.

 

The air danced beneath his fingers.

 

He peeked through the opening.

 

Blue. Like the ocean, only the water carrying more shining plankton than salt. Slow avenues of lightning crawled to the center of the earth, or maybe squid legs reached up from an unseen body. Bricks of flat and sturdy paneling hummed contentedly on the walls of a plummeting skyscraper shaft. Genji angled his helmet up and down and against the fissure, headguard squeaking on the rock. He could not see where the engineered area ended or began. When the wind strengthened on his face again, it came from the below, warm and powerful. Synthesized voices sang overhead.

 

_1x0x8._

The Net handle appeared on his personal network, a machine he had yet to meet. Only the moment it surfaced, the name changed. _1x0x8_ was now _ _6323_. Network IDs, personal or otherwise, tended to allow just one name switch, with a fair number of hoops to jump. On the worldwide Net they even began charging for it if someone switched more than once. But another second later, the mystery ID was named _samss_.

 

Genji stepped back from the jagged window. _Okay, Sam._ He sent a friend request.

 

 _ERROR: WARNING: INCOMPATIBLE DEVICE - MODIFIED. ERROR: DEVICE NO ACCESS._ The messages printed on his visor feed, text-only. _samss_ disappeared from his network list, gone out of range, or set to invisible status. He supposed he could count it as his second rejection since arriving to the Shambali’s mountain.

 

The rest of the pathway to the monastery ran under ribs of pebbled gray stone, like walking up the throat of a whale.

 

A couple divergences layered the exit. Genji took the route glazed by a white film of sunlight. He emerged from a simple door in a rotunda, maneuvering down short stair into the monastery yard. Thin snowpack crunched beneath his feet. The castle stretched up and away from him, a blueprint of pillars and pale brick walls. Gold and green flags drew serpentines on the heights.

 

Genji sprang out across the featureless yard and climbed the wall to an exposed balcony. His armored body crouched after arriving over the stone railing, keen to the memory of a pistol bolt in his belly wiring. No one came for him on the monastery precipice, even as he sat waiting, sharp knees pointed out. He scampered up another brief staircase to the interior.

 

Candles packed along the crevices of the grand room, issuing the warm light of scentless wax. The roof carved a hole to the sun, loops of daylight and red cloth webbing the air over the central platform. All thirty of the brothers and sisters dotted the tiers above the platform, and all of the adherents among them, listening while the Shambali broadcast songs in mechanical language. Genji could only read the occasional element of Nepali in their voices, their faces raised to the light.

 

He had never seen the mudras Zenyatta and Mondatta wrote upon the central platform. Zenyatta’s elbows stood perpendicular out from his sides, firm as doubled iron bars, palms raised to each other. Between his hands coiled an eclipse, a black coal ringed by white fire. Mondatta’s arms pinned apart like the open wings of a bird, a sun-colored sphere dripping before his chest.

 

Both Masters floated above a bronze tapestry of omnic symbols, a red wire extracted from each of their slender spines and linked to a connector in the floor. Nine rosary orbs fixed out at stations from their bodies, constant as stars, bleeding iridescent halos into space. Zenyatta’s arms trembled around the dark egg in his care, but he lifted golden figures out of his body in unison with Mondatta. Six new shining hands turned behind each of them, making gestures to gods.

 

Heat overpowered Genji, sinking under his armor to meet him. He was naked to it. The Shambali around him did not move, but some of the adherents twitched and shivered. Genji sat before he fell, drawing his knees together and hanging his hands on the rock steps to the platform, scraping with his mindless fingertips. He registered a wan blue light surging up the Masters’ sides, water from the electronic wellspring beneath them. As their bodies faded to shadows in golden clothes, Genji registered wheels of omnic text cycling over their heads, each orbit tied to a red pillar that rose to meet the skylight. Patterns and etched equations fizzled in and out of view from the pillar, reflecting in the white panels of Genji’s armor as he breathed in the warmth of the two brothers.

  

As the touch poured over his shoulders and sides, not two hands or six, but an infinite, sliding contact as unquantifiable as light, he pulled up his meditation gesture, dragging his legs into an orderly cross. Let it pass.

 

Hanzo chased Genji’s limping flight around the bell. _Genji,_ he ordered, irritated. Of all the things to be annoyed with. But Genji stopped, waited for him, hands shaking at his sides. Hanzo came and the first part of him that made contact was the sword. He leaned in to get the blade all the way through. Genji tipped his chin onto a supportive shoulder. He had the strength to lift one arm, sliding red fingers up the fist holding the sword, over the head of the tattoo etched out beneath Hanzo’s sleeve. Genji heard the chimes of thunder, light looped out of Hanzo’s chest and shoulder, and his reaching hand evaporated in a puff of pink.

 

Flashes of the dragon’s blue scales echoed off his sundered breastplate. He slowed before Genji’s eyes, the same as watching branches from a tree of lightning divide from themselves, veering away infinitely into the night. Golden arms passed over him from behind to frame the sword, making a lotus of fingers around the metal. Hanzo was gone, they were not standing in the bell house, and the dragon’s scales rang as he swam to Genji.

 

His right hand rose to his chest, intact again, gold fingers grazing his knuckles and the back of his wrist. As Genji looked at the blue dragon before him, he raised two fingers below his chin, and closed the others. He slid his left hand below the handle of the sword without making contact, holding his fingers together, palm flat. The light at his back withdrew, lines and spots of blood sinking back into his clothing as it departed. Genji raised his hand to retrieve the sword. His palm turned away from his torn chest filled by a red flower.

 

The dragon arrived. It passed over him like a river. There was no pain.

 

He opened his eyes, panting. Aside from his occasional failing, meditation was not sleep. He recalled the cessation of machine song around him, the metal feet tapping away across the stone. An impression more than a visual record: Mondatta calling back the dark sun from between Zenyatta’s hands, and Zenyatta taking the golden idol from Mondatta’s heart.

 

He could hear Mondatta teaching some of the Shambali in another room now. The last student climbed to his feet, and went to the center of the abandoned hall alone. Looking off the platform’s side, he confirmed the chasm of blue machine panels locked into the walls.

 

“Hi Sam.” Genji hunkered down to Zenyatta’s connection site, the inputs covered now by a seamed plate. He raised his hand, stopped with an uncertain flux of his visor light, then reached to the back of his neck. Knocked his fingertip down the terraces of silver armor guarding him. Air hissed out as he popped the scales on-end, jamming his digit in the slots.

 

Couldn’t feel anything. Visor beeped a pressure warning at him. He tried opening the connector plate on the floor instead. Couldn’t. But he remembered Angela. Not her touch; just the vision of her white hands wrapping around his throat.

 

The ruddy computer output over his head intensified. The hologram spit long lines of new omnic characters across its multi-storied wheels. “Sorry, excuse me,” Genji told the unintelligible light, and went to the Shambali classrooms.

 

Guided by instinct, and eventually a familiar voice, he reached Zenyatta’s class at the furthest recesses. He settled on a mat in the back.

 

“Greetings, my friend,” Zenyatta said to him after the lesson ended. “Have your thoughts been productive today?”

 

“Fixated,” Genji answered. Zenyatta floated to a seat on the empty students’ bench one row ahead of him. “I cannot think about what you have suggested. But probably…” He rubbed his knee. “I know what I have to do to break free.”

 

"Tell me."

 

“An errand. You have to promise not to follow me.”

 

“Japan,” Zenyatta deduced instantly, and Genji’s visor dimmed.

 

“I know you want to go, but I need you to promise to wait here, where it is safe.”

 

Zenyatta tilted his head at the final word.

 

“I promise.”

 

“Thank you.” Genji looped his arms over his knees, leaning his helmet cheek to his shoulder. As always, Zenyatta waited patiently for him to reveal himself. “Hey, Zen. When we first met, on that clifftop, did you save me?”

 

“What did you see back then?”

 

Genji bit his tongue, but it was not as if that kind of gesture stopped his synthesizer from responding.

 

“It was someone else…impossible. Now I understand it was you. So, thank you. You are like a light for me, no matter where we go.”

 

“The warmth of the Iris flows through me.”

 

Genji stared. Zenyatta laughed. “I guess you did not pay much attention to the lesson,” he amended.

 

“Oh…” Genji bunched up. “Sorry, I am not that great with classroom stuff.”

 

“That is not true. You are very bright, you have learned quickly from me.” Zenyatta’s voice warmed: “And you see things I do not.”

 

“That is different.” Genji held up his hands, and turned his palms to each other. “Standing face-to-face, that is how my father taught. I was alright with that. Or when I was really small, I would stand and he would squat down.” He lowered his arms, visor pulsing. “He wanted me to have a tutor for the regular types of lessons others learn, and I was the idiot who demanded to go to a regular school. I just wanted to meet people. And so…how do I get into university now, Father?” Genji laughed, mostly in his shoulders. He settled himself enough to question aloud: “I wonder if my brother finished.” Then he started snickering again. “I wonder if he kept taking it so seriously. Give everything up, and become an academic!”

 

“You have not mentioned him before.”

 

“Oh?” Genji drawled coyly. “His name is Hanzo. He doesn’t matter. Anyway--” He framed his arms out from his body in one of the golden mudras. “I think your squid legs make me nostalgic.” Zenyatta held his faceplate straighter at the characterization. “Sorry, the Iris,” Genji teased. The omnic settled.

 

“It would not be unusual to see past as present within Its embrace. Time proves an illusion.”

 

“That must be it then,” Genji sighed. “Can you show me where the chimes are?”

 

“Is that why you came here? I thought you had merely grown curious.”

 

“I disappoint you again.”

 

“Defying expectations is hardly disappointing,” Zenyatta soothed. “Follow me.”

 

“What does an omnic need with a computer?” Genji asked as they returned through the main hall. “Cheating on your meditations?” He elbowed Zenyatta’s chassis.

 

“It is the other way around.”

 

“Can you teach me those omnic symbols next, so I can tell what the output says?”

 

“Not if you are going to Japan…” Zenyatta mused. Genji’s visor light fluttered.

 

“Maybe after,” he mumbled.

 

They left behind the computer and its holographic signals for the open sky.

 

Blinding light bounced off the vestiges of snow. Genji’s eyeframe polarized, and planted target chevrons over four massive omnics lining the roadside. He scooted reverse into the monastery atrium. Zenyatta puttered along between the giants, pausing beside a stupa with dreams of fountainhood. He looked back, and waved at Genji.

 

The cyborg crept into the sun. Locked in memories of meditation, the figures around him had bronze skins instead of silver, and reclined five meters high. He hunched and balanced one of his hands on a knee-high wall as he examined the pads welded into the robots’ folded legs. White rings flowed out of the pads, balancing the figures on pedestals another meter beneath them. Statues.

 

Genji squeezed between Zenyatta and the stupa, holding one arm across the omnic’s shoulders as they stood beneath the watchers’ eyes. Misnomer: two of the figures had nearly solid faceplates with little sign they could see out of what vertical sutures had been provided, and the other two had monocular bars across their armor. The gangly bodies flexing to nirvana resembled a Shambali, but the heads glared eyeless and fierce.

 

“They are intimidating?” Zenyatta wondered.

 

“Just unexpected,” Genji coughed. “I did not take the Shambali to be keen on monuments to themselves.”

 

“My brothers and sisters do not mean to invoke a specific omnic. I think the translation is ‘the path to enlightenment is open to all’.”

 

“Those faces would have trouble witnessing the Iris.”

 

Zenyatta stroked the air before his own face.

 

“The plate is only for representation, not function.” He held out both hands around the sides of Genji’s helmet. “Compatibility.” Genji looked up and down his teacher’s chrome mask, focus lingering on the weathered line of Zenyatta’s smile.

 

“Trying to have a human face?” he mulled. He thought of the talons coalescing around the stream in the caverns below, and tapped the corners of Zenyatta’s slots with his thumbs. “Did you choose these sad eyes?”

 

“You see them as sad?” Zenyatta framed Genji’s hands and his own artless cheeks beneath his steel fingertips. He looked like someone trying to hide a blush. Genji chuckled at him.

 

“When I was human, I would change my face too. New hairstyles, make-up, look like a different person every day.” He released Zenyatta, but tapped the omnic on his glowing forehead. “There it is again, nostalgia. Like a fever. Come on, let us find the chimes.”

 

Zenyatta showed him to a building between two of the gigantic figures. The low ceiling was staffed with fresh red wood, capping a cozy study of rugs and cabinetry. Scrolls of omnic writing painted the walls, handmade like calligraphy, though Genji guessed Zenyatta had not been involved. The omnic excavated worn drawers in a cabinet beneath the artwork, finally opening one to bare a parade of old bronze bells.

 

“Do you have a purpose for them?” Zenyatta’s bony fingers plucked a chime free. He cupped it in both hands as he offered it to Genji.

 

“I just wanted some to hang outside the barn.” Genji rocked the tiny chime in his palm, listening to the rattle of its muffled clapper. “Now I just need to catch a vulture,” he whistled.

 

“It is the right time of year to depart the mountain and collect the feathers that may fall in the valley.”

 

“I’m not ready to leave yet,” the swordsman said quickly, running his finger along the bell’s broadside.

 

“Then you might try seeing if there are any spare pieces of cloth around.”

 

 _m.o.n: Genji, would you be sure to clean the shrine when you return?_ Genji received a video clip of Bhālē lurking over ragged, chewed-up red corollas, loose rope hanging from his head, petal-strewn pats scattered around the shrine pillar.

 

_karroten: My apologies! I will take care of it!_

_m.o.n: Thank you._

Zenyatta made a noise, like a cough, his lights twinkling. He led Genji to the rotunda in the monastery yard, showing him the correct path that did not involve leaping from a balcony or spidering down walls.

 

Bhālē was now tied properly to a post by the wild grass. The yak had a bucket of water to drink from. Zenyatta checked the bucket and took it to refill while Genji zipped around gathering cleaning supplies and mopping the shrine tiles. He could not do anything about the massacre of flowers, except imagine that by the end of summer all would grow back again.

 

* * *

 

A golden omnic with an upside-down teardrop head and an unadorned faceplate slid his hand beneath Genji’s, taking him by the wrist. The omnic twisted the appendage side-to-side, pinched cyborg fingers between his own rubber-padded digits, and pulled and flexed his captives. He backed off briefly, pulling on a headset that covered his entire face, a wall in the center opening up a faceted pink eye.

 

“You need your weapons looked at again?”

 

“I haven’t practiced with them,” Genji murmured, staring at the black-and-white thorns of his fingers poking from the omnic’s grip.

 

“That is a long time to not have used them. I’ll give you a new cleaning kit.” The engineer turned his cyclopean attachment at the arm, pink lens protruding out millimeters, shrinking back, the shy eye of a swallowing frog. “Gonna poke you here.” He pointed at Genji’s index finger, and pulled an instrument from his toolbox. It resembled the empty base of a screwdriver. When the engineer squeezed it on, a dot of light arrowed to the dark gray underplate of Genji’s fingertip. “I want you to tell me when you feel pressure.”

 

He started guiding the cylinder forward, the dot brightening. Genji felt nothing, but his fingers contracted. “Relax. It’s only a few molecules wide.” Genji tried holding as still as he could. “Relax,” the engineer demanded anyway.

 

“I didn’t do anything,” he protested.

 

“Yes, but your heart is giving itself an arrhythmia.” Genji looked at his chest. Swallowing awkwardly around the air, he busied himself with studying the interior of the empty house where the omnic nested his equipment.

 

Pressure paralyzed his finger, his gasp choked in the throat of his synthesizer, and he darted out of his chair. The engineer’s pink eye adjusted up his body, focusing on his head. “Listen to me. When you said you would try, that is a tacit agreement between you and me that you’re not going to fly away from a little jab. I can’t complete the diagnostic if you don’t stay still.”

 

“Angela…” Genji wheezed, looking at the cracked white light coming through the holes in the wooden window screen. The engineer’s synth crackled between sigh and growl, and he rubbed the side of one of his pointy feet against his embroidered leg.

 

“If you don’t want to stay, you have the option of allowing me to convey the information to someone else.” Genji’s visor turned to the omnic, who flipped up his headset as the eye in the center darkened. The engineer pointed at him. “So they can peer-pressure you into accepting treatment!” When the Shambali indicated someone, they used their whole arm or hand. The engineer had only a single accusing finger. Genji fixated on the mold lines of the tactile rubber compound patch at the fingertip, the ghost of a print. “If you have someone in mind, we can sign the documentation right here.” Genji dimmed his visor, backing into the even dapples of sunlight from the diamond window screen.

 

“I don’t…”

 

“Don’t want to?” The engineer clicked off his suite of exam lights. “Okay. Then I guess we’re done here, unless you want to sit back down.” Genji jumped at the greeting note of jet engines, and the engineer raised his featureless face at the ceiling. Dove wings passed the window. “Ah, Mondatta. Go get him for me.”

 

“He needs something repaired?” Genji mumbled, willing his voice into a question louder than the ringing in his skull.

 

“None of your business I’m afraid.”

 

“Do omnics require a lot of maintenance?”

 

“Well no. Mostly self-sufficient, just like you _I imagine,_ ” the robot sniffed. “But precautionary tunings and exams are good sense. So says I, the one who gets paid to do them. Now go fetch Mondatta instead of standing there like a lump. I’ll drop off the tools for you later.” Genji’s shoulders twitched, his chin dropped in a nod, and he lurched for the door. “Genji,” the engineer called. The cyborg looked back. “You should let me look up here.” The omnic pointed at the back of his skull. “There is a component I do not recognize. It looks tacked on.”

 

“A brain?”

 

“Very funny. It is mechanical. Does the number ‘26’ mean anything to you? I thought you were ‘25’.” He gestured to Genji’s pectoral plate.

 

Genji lingered in the opened door, raising his hand to the stamp on his chest.

 

“Yes,” he agreed in a gravely choke of his synth, swallowing hard again. “Angela is proud of me.” He let himself out rather than return to the dark and the slender, pointy engineer propped on a tin stool.

 

As he got out of the house, into the unfiltered daylight, his throat tightened and his tongue dried in his mouth, reminding him it existed. He aimed his feet at the reflecting snow path to the landing pad, but as he walked, his visor blurred and an abyss settled in the canals of his ears. Had the engineer passed something through his atomic needle? Was it not the same omnic he met each year? He felt cold, a body packed with snow instead of nanites, only a doll, shaking. The neat line of his footprints wavered, individual steps darkened as he stumbled over his own unfeeling legs. Could not speak, synth rasping inside his neck.

 

“Genji,” a synthesized voice called, tender mechanical hands wrapping around his arm before he fell. He could hear the Shambali, even though his ears were full of insulation strip rubbing static. The gauzy outline of an omnic materialized at each side, two of the monks drawn to him. He shook his head beneath the too-bright sun.

 

“I didn’t mean to share that…”

 

“Come and sit,” the second Shambali insisted, and they pulled him out of the day’s cheery glare, onto a swinging bench that hung from house eaves he could not recognize. Genji startled at the clatter of stretching chains, his toes dragged along the porch with the bench’s soft momentum. He collapsed against the wooden bars of the bench back, dropping his head as the Shambali linked arms across his lower back. One touched the side of his headguard.

 

“I’m sorry,” he panted as fuzziness rolled over his consciousness in a wave, but refused to release him to the bliss of some mental darkness. A flush moved up and down nonexistent skin in pitch-perfect simulation, and his back arched in a stiff spasm. “I don’t- don’t feel well,” he excused as quickly as he could.

 

“Do you need space? Do you want us to stop touching?”

 

“No. Please.” He cracked one hand out of a reactive fist and groped for omnic fingers, interlocking when he found them. He tilted into the warm hug of one of the Shambali, the other snuggling at his side. A faceplate tucked against his chest armor. He gripped the back of the robot’s head under his palm. His breathing shifted their bodies too, but otherwise they did not move. The weight of them was more important than their inexplicable temperatures; he followed the designs of their embraces until he found his own body beneath them.

 

His helmet was nestled against the top of one omnic’s head when his vision cleared. He still feared the white knife of daylight past the porch, but as he rested between the two Shambali his mind relaxed into something capable of putting thoughts together. A processor of more than suffocation. He noticed a frazzled cotton braid around the wrist of a robotic hand resting on his collar frame. The dye had nearly gone out of the threads. It was going to break apart any day now. It was beautiful. “I thought I was better than this,” he croaked. “This kind of thing should have gone away by now.”

 

“I do not think they ever go away.” The omnic at his chest looked up. “That is why Master says when it is over, you are not supposed to wonder why, just let it depart your thoughts. It is not your fault.”

 

“No?” Genji chuckled. Eventually the world past the little patch of shadow where he had taken refuge grew clear, and started looking like it had ground he could walk again. He saw the outline of Mondatta’s dove-winged ship leaving the village, but stayed with the two omnics a few minutes longer. “Thank you,” he murmured against them. “I can get up now.” He demonstrated, then bowed to the pair, who bade him farewell in turn.

 

The world was colder without them, a pregnant stagnancy waiting for the next incident, but Genji tolerated it. He could see the necessary future, if he was to be free. Wind chimes, speaking in new languages, and dawns in the commons building lifted away from him.

 

He found Mondatta on one of the white couches in his home. The monitors were on, odd since omnics did not require mediums to interface with streams. Data always came in like their own eyes and ears. Mondatta stared at the three panels even after Genji let himself in, though he muted the warring voices of the reporters. Genji searched the room fresh and listened towards the kitchen and stairwell, and asked, “Where is Zenyatta?”

 

“At the monastery,” Mondatta answered without looking back. “Is he not responding to your messages?”

 

“Nothing like that,” Genji grumbled. “Um, the engineer wants you to go see him.”

 

“Ah.” Mondatta rose from his seat, broadcasts reflecting on the curve of his faceplate. “I may have skipped his attention last time.”

 

“For you, it is important,” Genji said, looking past Mondatta at what had so captivated his interest.

 

The first screen was the British government’s sanctioned livestream, showing an interview with two omnics who painted their faceplates broad, bright stripes of royal blue and red. With the sound muted he could not hear them, but they turned away from the camera as some men and women in suits passed by toward a large, stately white building in the background. The omnics took a few steps toward the suits and were intercepted by stun drones also dressed in flag colors. Human police officers with tablets in their hands followed the drones.

 

One of the omnics backed off, but the other grabbed her arm and took another step forward. A drone extended its electrical barrel and zapped the lead robot, but their linked hands meant the second conducted, and both collapsed to the ground, squirming till their bodies smoked. The stun drone leveled one of its large pistons at the first omnic’s head. Its monocular lens swiveled at the tablet held by one of the police officers, and it stood down with a dull pop of its signal lights.

 

The second monitor had Chinese characters on the blinker bar, and showed a wrinkly gray animal with a bloody hole on the end of its nose laying in the corner of a concrete stall. The camera switched angles and the bars on the stall were shown, bent open, finger impressions etched in the steel.

 

On the third monitor, Genji recognized Strike Commander Morrison speaking at a podium. An omnic in a knee-length black dress and white blazer stood next to him, tilting her head as he made his ragged way through a speech Genji could not hear. He did not see Mr. Reyes, or Amari, just blue-uniformed Overwatch soldiers lining the rows before their Commander, and civilians waving signs beyond them. A historical reel spliced into the livestream, showing Morrison leading troops to an unseen island battle, another clip of him standing before a U.N. council and miraculously ducking an assassin’s bullet, and one other video of him throwing a bucket of water over the back of a beached pilot whale, and flicking a thumbs-up at the camera. The stream lingered on the last segment of footage before swapping its picture back to Morrison’s present-day hairline.

 

“Is it only important for me?” Mondatta chuckled.

 

“You keep the others safe,” Genji insisted. “I don’t know why you ever leave.”

 

“Can you elaborate?” Mondatta walked out from the intersection of couches to speak with Genji face-to-face.

 

“No one wants to hurt you here. Everyone can live happily here.”

 

“If only that were so.”

 

“If you want to talk to everyone in the world, you should just run a Net stream.”

 

“I do, actually. But when people cannot see you with their own eyes, sometimes your intentions and sincerity become unclear. Have you taken Zenyatta’s lessons to heart, Genji?”

 

“Zenyatta...?” he sputtered.

 

“The belief that peace can only be communicated from one soul to another, and that saving the world is impossible.”

 

“I don’t know anything about that-- Zenyatta does not think anything is impossible.”

 

“Interesting.” Mondatta sighed, the diamond of lights on his forehead fading as he lowered his chin. “Then perhaps it is only my methods he dislikes.”

 

“Who cares what Zenyatta thinks?” Genji snorted with a frustrated upward flap of his arms. Regret shadowed the words. He took a breath before he continued, letting the irritation pass. “Everything outside this place is dangerous. There is nothing wrong with just being happy.”

 

“Is that what you will do? Stay here and be happy?”

 

“I am different.”

 

Mondatta touched his shoulder.

 

“I see no difference. And like you, I desire to change the world.”

 

Genji stared, and shook his head.

 

“No. Mine is…”

 

“You cannot speak it aloud? Then maybe you should not do something to which you cannot give a name,” Mondatta hummed.

 

“Just not to you.”

 

“Try Zenyatta then. As for me, I will be as careful as I can. But a static, pleasant life will never be my goal. I must leave some material for my dreams!” An advertisement maximized itself on the central monitor, and the red and white colors of a soft drink label shimmered around the edges of Mondatta’s plating. Genji groaned, giving up the argument with a brief hug to the Shambali leader.

 

As he left a few other Shambali were coming up the porch.  Mondatta spied them through the open door, waving them inside. One was carrying a new white robe for the Master.

 

_karroten: Don’t forget the engineer._

_m.o.n: I will see him before he departs. Thank you for delivering his message._

 

Genji had not thought about it before, but maybe Mondatta’s time alone was like a moment of peace. The door closed behind him on laughter and joyful voices, releasing him to the world.

 

His new sword maintenance kit waited for him at the front shutter of the loft. The outer layers, a silken drape and the box itself, were decorative. He took out a card-sized sheet of seamed plasmetal and slipped it into his wakizashi scabbard.

 

Wind chimes littered the floor of the loft, a theater of bronze stupas. Scraps of cloth meant to tie the clappers made spectrums across the remaining wooden real estate. Assistance from the village tailors had been easy to come by; it was Genji’s fingers that proved unreliable. No more need for it, he thought. He went through and packed the bells and cloths under the book table holding all the texts with pages he could not turn. He opened a drawer with an unfinished yellow braid inside, reaching in to hold the wooly intestine in his fist. A blank bead tassel knocked on the joints of his fingers. Genji released the braid and closed the drawer. He had no time.

 

He sat down on his mattress, as though to wait for dreams, but he kept looking at the drawer. The cyborg settled for taking out a chime bell instead, and a single scrap of cloth. He took them out onto the bridge beyond the rear shutter, sitting down with his legs dangling from the walkway. Balancing his elbows on the lowest beam of the barrier fence, he tried tying the cloth to the bell clapper. Pins and needles traveled his joints through all the false starts, missed loops, and weak knots.

 

The cloth flapped, summer’s yellow-green in the festering orange of the sunset. Genji lifted the bell by its hanger, and the wind evoked a single note. He smiled, and got up to hang the bell beside the shutter. He went back to the table drawer, but only to get the ID Zenyatta had given him. Genji folded it to a micro-dot of plastic, pressing it into the scabbard fold beside the new maintenance kit. He would have to remember to destroy the identification once he got to Japan.

 

Tethers locked the scabbards to his back automatically as he raised each sword to his spine, he built to match the weapons. It was all familiar again in the dark. It did not feel like betrayal at all to go out back and let himself down the route he had planned in his first days among the Shambali.

 

He dropped below the barn barriers, then poked his head and elbow back over the ridge.

 

“Goodbye,” he said to Bhālē. The yak tilted a sleepy leaf ear at him.

 

Genji let himself down the mountainside, the rocks less slippery this time of year. He passed piled, twiggy vulture nests with only broken eggshells inside.

 

The slope eased, drooping plants poked through the rock, and he was able to walk the rest of the way down, though a loose gravel patch turned some of the journey into a slide. He sat on the ground, looking at his dusty hands and legs, and noted the time readout from his app: 5:00AM.

 

The sun took longer to rise in the valley. He hunted through shadows, creeping past bundles of white flowers charging from the black dirt. There were insects winding through the soil and floating in the air, but he did not hear any birds. Following the distant light, he stepped around a meter-wide lattice of spiderwebs between blades of grass, and heard water babbling over the ground ahead.

 

Beside a stream was a wooden house with its roof buckled into a vee, wall boards crunched outward like teeth, windows and doorways empty and open. A piece of white tape wrapped the outskirts, Nepali script on it: _CONDEMNED. DO NOT ENTER. BD ORDER#073.2040._ Genji grabbed the tape in his fist. After holding fast to the words for a moment, he let go and ducked underneath instead.

 

The whole house was a single room, like his loft. An old stove had its metal mouth wrenched apart to vomit moss and flies in the far corner. Water sweated off splintered beams to puddle on the brief imprint of cement and tile that had once been the floor. Grass grew throughout, as did the unrepentant odor of mushrooms and moist weeds. Genji pushed at the soggy walls. They did not fall in on him.

 

He seated himself at dead center, beneath the roof piercing of dawn light, and assumed his meditation. The stream chattered at his back. Occasionally water dripped down his armor, but he did not move. He only observed, and focused on the task at hand.

 

Hanzo lay beneath his foot, Genji’s sword through his heart. The bow of his lips terminated in froth and vines of red. What had once been only a clot of intention within his processor was now vague only about Hanzo’s eyes: sometimes dry, sometimes building to a wash over the lower lids, sometimes stained with translucent pink cobwebs. Always open, so Genji could spot his own reflection in the flat darkness. He only ever imagined the arms taken, so Hanzo’s legs stretched long and tranquil beyond his torso, shiny in their boots like a fish tail. Genji could adjust the crook of his katana in his brother’s chest and all the blood would come out, instant and kind. No one would take him. There would be nothing to take.

 

The hands holding Genji’s sword were pink with flesh. The reflection in Hanzo’s dead fish eyes had lips-- they were not smiling --and youthful spikes of gelled hair-- they were black --and wore old clothes of their training days as boys. Genji adjusted the measure of the scene, wound Hanzo back onto his feet, put his blue sword back in his hands. Though, at the river, Hanzo had only carried his bow.

 

 _I will not pick up that sword again._ Genji glared at the representation of his brother. But he noticed his own chest: gasping. A heart drumming under his ribs. The ghost white shell of a man in the drowned house exhaled his worries with a static throb of his synthesized breath. Why be alarmed at anything Hanzo did? The worst had already been realized, years and years ago.

 

 _Ryuu ga waga teki wo kurau,_ he thought back at the figurine facing him. All he needed was to speak those words. All Hanzo needed was to hear them. The circle of dragons would be complete. If they never showed in this world again, that would be alright. People would probably just put them in zoos.

 

Beige moths and green flies flickered through the woody air around him, setting sometimes on his body to guzzle the water drops stuck to his armor. Ants made lines in and out of sunlight, traveling down a broken roof beam beside Genji. Would Hanzo really use the bow? The fight would be different. He stayed, contemplating his vision, trying to settle on one or the other.

 

The next day it rained, and the stream behind the house overflowed the foundations. Drooled over Genji’s folded legs in fitful pushes, reflected his soaked throne in piecemeal portraiture. He did not try to escape the deluge, but moved both hands down flat against the sides of his legs, one of Zenyatta’s postures. It was harder to think of Hanzo, but not an unpleasant way to wait out the storm. He recalled he was should have been trying one of the adherents’ dishes today. He always thought he would have been free once he got through all the Shambali, but more omnics constantly joined Mondatta’s fief. It was the sweetest of obligations. He had no voice to apologize with.

 

When he was ready to rest, he moved out of the rainfall and sat down on a dry, intact dining table. He braced his knuckles on the clover-strewn wood in front of him, and slept on his crossed legs.

 

The next morning, he turned on his visor feed, leveling his head at the oozing, sunlit wound in the ceiling. He scooted off the table and untangled his legs. From the center of the house, he looked up into a cleaned blue sky. His visual feed sketched a white circle around a point of interest, but it was much closer than heaven.

 

The bone-pale disc of an owl’s face leered at him from the rotten stub of a rafter. The owl had huge black eyes and a furrow running from the inner corner of each that joined into a small, hooked beak. Maybe it was the reason he had never heard any birds or mice around the house, just the insects so small as to be beneath its notice.

 

“Good luck?” he wondered at it dryly in Nepali. The owl did not respond. He could not call it cute, its eyes cut too narrow. Nothing like the cafes in Tokyo where they could be pet and came in all different colors, glitter embedded in their feathers, owls crossed with flowers. Genji rolled onto his toes and tried jamming a fingertip against one of the long cream talons gnarled against the softened wood. He was not tall enough. The owl did not move. Maybe it was dead. He could not hear its heart.

 

Genji went outside to find a stick he could poke it with. Sitting beside the stream, back to him, was Zenyatta. The omnic had his legs stretched out on the bank, yellow pants matted in the sand. It was their work hour, but Zenyatta had not called his hands to any kind of pose. Genji noticed one was holding together some blades of grass. Zenyatta rubbed his fingertips together around the vegetation, his head turning at the other side of the river. Water ran down the coils of red cable on his back. Genji could have walked away and the omnic would have been none the wiser. “Zenyatta,” he groaned instead.

 

Zenyatta’s faceplate swiveled at the sound, his shoulders twisting up when he discovered Genji behind him. The top left signal light was blocked, and the obstruction spread its wings nervously at the robot’s movement: a cornflower butterfly, black tiger stripes making calligraphy on the lower edges of its wings.

 

“Peace and blessings, Genji,” Zenyatta offered in his most conversational tone.

 

“You are getting your pants dirty.” Genji walked over and squatted to pinch the yellow cloth. This pair was no longer new, but the Shambali mountaintop did not provide much environmental challenge to sturdy handcraft on a floating machine. Zenyatta had already drawn a tear in the ankle just by entering the valley, and grass stains shadowed the sides. Zenyatta was looking at Genji’s face, not his trousers. Genji took a breath. “You promised to stay,” he advised, with a hint of command.

 

“If you went on an errand.” Zenyatta nodded. “But it seemed no one knew where you went, and I expected you would tell someone if you left on an errand.” The lights on Zenyatta’s head were so bright they fashioned the butterfly’s scaling translucent, a rainbow haunting the air as the creature flexed its wings. Zenyatta gestured to Genji’s back, and made little air-chops with the sides of his hands. “I thought you might be in danger when I realized you had taken your weapon.”

 

Genji hung his head. When he felt like lifting his visor again, it had a hazy green smile for the monk.

 

“What would you do if I was in danger?”

 

Zenyatta held out a golden ball of light. Genji reached out to meet his hand, and the sphere drifted over his palm, composing lines of warmth up his right arm, intimate as blood. The lips behind his mask twitched to life, smiling. “What about the other one?”

 

The omnic tipped his head. “The scary one from the monastery.” Zenyatta’s indicators dimmed. He raised his other hand and a ripple of nightfall spilled from the unlatching interior of a rosary orb. Genji knocked their wrists together, trying to exchange lights. Zenyatta pulled his arm away.

 

“This one is not for you.” The black hole vanished. Genji plopped down in the mud beside him, and showed off the brilliant ball of energy caressing his arm.

 

“You don’t have to send the shell over anymore?”

 

“Meeting with Mondatta has allowed me to reach greater understanding,” Zenyatta admitted. Genji poked his shoulder.

 

“Does he know where you are?”

 

“I told everyone where I went. He has no reason to fret.”

 

“I wonder.” Genji rubbed under his ribbon. “Are you going to follow me?”

 

“May I come with you?”

 

“You won’t like the ending.”

 

“I believe in you, Genji.”

 

Genji rocked his visor up at the sky. Zenyatta’s roosting butterfly took off, fluttering between Genji and the clouds.

 

“Want to wish for good luck?” he sighed. He pushed the golden orb back to Zenyatta’s chain, and the light faded. Genji got to his feet and strutted back to the house, not bothering to clear off the mud caked on his legs. He stopped in the doorway, and searched the rafters: empty. “I guess I imagined it.” Zenyatta drifted past him, through the shadows of the broken home. “You would have liked him. He can’t move his face either.” Zenyatta looked at the cracked flooring. “The earthquakes?” Genji guessed.

 

“I imagine so.” Water from the ceiling dripped down Zenyatta’s faceplate as the omnic looked at him. “Do you want to start walking now?”

 

“Not really,” Genji grunted. Zenyatta straightened, and Genji waved his hand. “Sorry. I’m not trying to be confusing. Let’s go.” As they traveled across moth-eaten pasture, he noticed Zenyatta floating along as if on a current. “Excited not to be cooped up?” he laughed.

 

“I love this world,” Zenyatta said, and upon realizing he was being serious, Genji blushed secondhand under his helmet. “I always want to see more of it.”

 

“I will try to see things the way you do.” He thought he would try on every step, every moment to the east. Zenyatta said something about true selves and the beauty of differences as they crossed the stream. Genji nodded absently, made a joke. Zenyatta laughed, and Genji apologized a thousand times without speaking a word, just listening to the chimes of his voice catch the wind.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : So this is what has become of you? A pity.
>   * _unicode_ \- computing industry standard for the representation of text
>   * _bhālē_ \- Nepali word for a rooster/male bird :P
>   * _stupa_ \- Sanskrit word (lit. "heap") for a mound-like structure, sometimes with a spire, used to hold Buddhist relics/remains, and to serve as a meditation site
>   * Added a character tag for Mondatta
>   * I made a blog for posting resources related to this fic, probably just a few sets of map screenshots but if you want them here you go╭(´□`)っ: <https://thebiblesalesman.tumblr.com/>
> 



	11. Sweet

 

“You do not have to be afraid, Brother.”

 

Metallic scales trickled green across the air, cording together into a bony head, filled with fangs and crowned by smooth goat horns. Sprouts of fur fanned from the keratin points of the dragon’s jaws, whiskers floating out like a koi’s upon the water. Bird and lion-voiced, the serpent whispered out of the well of Genji’s shoulderblades, snarled over his arm. Mouth agape, he lunged for the arrowhead leaf in the boy’s hand. The miniature hissed from his perch. Genji grinned, and the dragon grit out his incisors too. “I am with you.”

 

Hanzo’s eyes, settled on the diamond progress of the river, rolled up to where the low autumn sun caught in them before they ever turned to his brother laying stomach down in the pearly sand. Genji waved the lizard at him. “I will protect you.” The fine pink margin of Hanzo’s lips broke into a smile.

 

“Thank you,” he scratched, throat gone dry for the season. He reached past the glaring dragon to thump Genji’s arm. “Don’t wear yourself out for fun.” Genji narrowed his eyes.

 

“It’s not for fun. This is how strong I am.” He raised his leaf defiantly, but a yawn staged an escape from his chest and the dragon dissipated. Hanzo snorted.

 

“So easily distracted.”

 

Genji flinched as his breath finished leaving him, pulling his arm out from beneath Hanzo’s heavy palm. He scrubbed at his eyes, pet his hair and glanced at the bones of his brother’s relaxed wrist. He sat up off his folded arms for a better survey. Hanzo raised an eyebrow.

 

“Your voice broke again.” Genji reached out along the sand, leaf still mushed beneath one of his fingers. “You got taller.” Hanzo lifted the hand for examination, searching the red scour at his fingertips, the callouses scuffing the sides of the joints.

 

“A good thing,” he decided. “You will, too.” Genji laid his cheek to the cross of his arms on the ground. He linked his ankles, tipping up his legs at the knee and rocking the joinder in the air.

 

“I am okay being small,” he proposed. “Easier to hide.” Hanzo’s focus had started to drift in the river again. Genji pushed out an elbow into the side of his leg. He turned, blinking, and touched his fingers to the back of Genji’s head. It was the closest he ever came to mussing the younger Shimada’s hair, as their father so often did.

 

“You will not think that way always.”

 

“Why not?”

 

Hanzo made a gravely noise in his throat.

 

“You just won’t.”

 

Genji flicked his head against the contact to shrug it off, and flopped over on his back. He pulled a phone from the pocket of his shorts. “Have you kept the GPS off?” Hanzo asked.

 

“Yeah yeah,” Genji muttered. He opened a game app, and navigated a Pachimari through a 2D soup bowl, dashing through noodle hoops, scooting the character up and down to avoid undesirable foods such as piman. Pachimari squeaked affirmatives every time it journeyed through a hoop. “Wish Father would hide us in the arcade instead,” Genji thought aloud. “Even you could find something to do there.”

 

“I have no time for children’s toys anymore.”

 

“There are people there,” Genji grunted. So easy for Hanzo to miss the obvious, the core of the apple. His brother crossed his arms, shoulders twitching up as he looked from the river to his own crossed legs.

 

“I have no time for those either,” he declared, less easily.

 

“...isn’t that weird?” Genji hovered his finger over the _NEXT LEVEL_ button “Aren’t you weird?” Hanzo scowled at him. He switched to his contact list. Selecting a name, Kosuke, he showed the contact photo to Hanzo. Kosuke was pink-cheeked and toothy in his grin, flashing a V at the camera. Genji was in the picture too: peeking his hair, an eye, and the top of his own V sign at the corner of the frame. “Look, I met this boy there just yesterday.” Hanzo rested his hand on the edge of the phone, turning the display panel closer to him. “He said I could come over any time, and his father would make dinner.”

 

“His father?” Hanzo’s irritation deepened his voice, eyes reviewing the contact’s full name. “How old is he?”

 

“My age.”

 

“He looks older.”

 

“How would you know, weirdo? You don’t meet anybody. They look different sometimes.” Genji stuck out his tongue.

 

“I do. I--” Hanzo shook his head. “You will show respect,” he course corrected.

 

“Then…do you sneak out to meet them?” Genji stared at his brother.

 

“I meet the ones Father recommends,” Hanzo answered, and Genji’s eyes glazed briefly. He wagged Hanzo in with his hand.

 

“But you don’t bring them over for dinner. We have a big dining room, they would all fit if you invited all of them at once--”

 

“That is not permissible.”

 

“I could ask Father if you think he will not listen to you. But he is traveling overseas next week, so.”

 

“Genji.” Hanzo’s eyebrows clawed at the bridge of his nose. “Do you not understand what has happened?” He flattened his back against the ebony trunk of the bowed cherry tree, studying the flank routes beyond the branches. Growling his teeth out like a dragon. “Other people are unsafe.” Genji looked from him to his phone screen, and circled his finger around Kosuke’s portrait, pressing his lips together.

 

“Was the man in our room one of the people you have met?”

 

“They are still determining where he came from.” Hanzo rested his head of long hair against the tree bark. Genji rocked his back upon the ripples of sand, draping his arms up and balancing the warm plate of the phone on his forehead. His eyes adjusted drowsily to the sun swaying through white-flowered vines after a night of squatting in the corner while bodyguards ran between his and Hanzo’s rooms.

 

“I slept through it,” he admitted. He drew the hand not holding his phone down his face, and wrapped his fingers loosely around his throat. Hanzo watched him feel the corner of his neck, then draw his fingertip down his immature Adam's apple, diagonally to his collar. His older brother smiled, a secret on the edge of Genji’s view.

 

“How do you protect anyone if you are always dreaming?” he warned.

 

“You sleep deeply too,” Genji complained. “It’s amazing you even woke for some guy shrieking his last. You probably thought it was a clock alarm for an exam.” Hanzo looked away from him, and Genji smirked, though the victory felt a little hollow on his tongue. The phone resting on his forehead vibrated, a call from Kosuke. Genji ignored it. A notification boop indicated the other boy sent him a text instead. Hanzo remained silent, and Genji looked to him. His eyes were closed, shoulders cozied up on the tree like he needed a hug from the gnarled branches. It could not be comfortable. The bark was not smooth. “Were you really afraid?” Hanzo’s eyes opened, locked on his.

 

“Genji!” a voice called from the border of the woods. The smaller son popped out of the dirt, smile fresh aglow.

 

“Father!” he called back, and murmured excitedly to Hanzo, “He is already back. Maybe he brought some food!” He scrambled off toward the piper’s song.

 

“Greetings, my little sparrow,” the man in the gray suit said as Genji hit the side of his leg and squeezed both arms around his waist. A nuanced right hand stroked the back of Genji’s head, rifling through his short black hair, warm as the sun mussing the spikes. “Did you forget to bring your brother with you?” Genji squeezed an eye open to see if his father’s other hand was holding a takeout bag, or perhaps a wrapped noodle bowl. He pouted against the suit cloth at the emptiness of slender fingers. “Ah, there he is.” The hand stilled on Genji’s skull. “May I speak with him alone?”

 

“Genji should hear what you have found,” Hanzo cut in like a cloud. “The assassin was meant for him, too.” Genji peeked past his father’s hip at his brother. He let go and moved back to Hanzo’s side, rocking his weight on his sneakers. Father glanced between the two of them.

 

“Alright.” He smiled thinly. “That corpse came from Aoyama.” His gray eyes and Hanzo’s dark ones fixed on each other. Genji peered from the smiling trickster face to the stoic one.

 

“When do we act?” Hanzo demanded.

 

“It is not so simple.” Father brushed his hand from side to side.

 

“It is. They must be destroyed. You and I could accomplish it easily.”

 

The elder Shimada sighed, sliding his hands into the pockets of his suit trousers.

 

“What do you think of your brother’s bloodlust, Genji?”

 

Hanzo’s face paled, his weight moved forward on one foot, toward their father. Genji took the side of his pants in his fist.

 

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” he said, trying to catch some of the glare aimed at their sole parent, but Hanzo would not have him. “Not for revenge.”

 

“It is not revenge, it is a logical, preemptive course of action!” Hanzo spat.

 

“There are greater hands to consider than those of our ugly neighbors,” Father said. “Aspects which you have not evaluated.” He looked over their heads, at the sky and the river, the sheltering tree on the bank. The forest unfurled dark and wild behind him, the white stones just off his ankles the only sign of human intervention. “We no longer inhabit a world where we may act freely.”

 

“Tell me,” Hanzo challenged. “I will enter all into calculation. The result will be the same.”

 

Father abandoned the humored cant of his clean-shaven face, and dragged his thumb down his jawline.

 

“I think for now it would be best that you respect your father’s wishes.”

 

Genji felt Hanzo’s leg tense, his back tightening. Hanzo’s eyes passed his way, but saw through him, fell to an absent side-to-side survey of the defeated grass below his feet. He bowed his head. Genji followed his lead. Hanzo spoke for both of them:

 

“Yes, Father.”

 

“Good. Now before we go-- and pick up some ramen, I think.” Genji grinned with his head still ducked. “Could you retrieve the fruits of your labor?” Genji blinked at the reeds on the ground, clouds circling his brain instead of substance. Hanzo grabbed his shoulder.

 

“Come.”

 

“I will await you here,” Father said. He went to the riverbank.

 

Genji shoved Hanzo off, but followed him. He squinted over his shoulder as they departed south. Father stood beside the cherry tree, hands still buried in his tailored pockets, looking dully across the water.

 

Pockets of wildflowers marked the good soil. Different seed shapes made confetti between the stems. Rolls of pitch-colored earth mixed with heavy, water-rounded stones took over the sand. Daisy waves of bright colors wafted their orange smells into the air. The forest weaved onto the river edge, heavy roots worming into the shallows. The water thickened, charging faster between gray teeth, misting the left sides of their bodies as they tracked the altered shore. Hanzo led to an uncolonized clearing, where two stalks rested beside each other, one in the hole of sunlight, the other just beneath the creeping shadow of a tree. Genji approached the sprout in the skylight. It reached near to his heart. He balled his fists on his hips triumphantly. A few turquoise flies cruised around the plant leaves and his legs.

 

“Mine grew bigger,” he informed his brother. Hanzo’s plant in the shade only touched his waist.

 

“Father chose where they would be planted,” Hanzo explained, quiet and deep.

 

“Sounds like an excuse coming on.” Genji stuck out his lower lip.

 

“He told me to plant mine in the shade,” Hanzo insisted. “You cannot surpass me normally, so he engineered this situation where you would artificially win. He knew you would brag about it. If I then reacted irrationally to your boasts, that would be the failure in his eyes. It would demonstrate I am still a child, like you.”

 

“You think he is only using me to test you?”

 

“A _crash test dummy._ ” Hanzo briefly invoked English for the unfortunate drones with yellow crosses on their faceplates. “That is all that you are.” Genji rubbed his toe into the dirt around the base of his plant, and a fly landed on his white sneaker tip. “But I will not lose to Father either.” Genji looked up, brow crinkling. “I waited to plant mine.” Hanzo’s voice stiffened smugly.

 

“Why would you do that?”

 

“Because of these.” Hanzo bent down and lifted the fly from Genji’s shoe, holding it up in front of his younger brother’s nose. The fly did not even rustle its wings at the change of perch. It had crimson eyes that twitched around and never blinked. “They reproduce earlier in the season, when you planted yours.”

 

Genji watched the fly rummage around Hanzo’s finger, to see if its activities would give any clue as to its devious intentions. His gaze drifted back to the ones resting on the sawtooth leaves of his nice green plant.

 

He squawked, dropped to his knees, jamming his hands in the soil. He scooped out the stalk and roots, and a couple shriveled black tubers he had to drop immediately: they were stuffed with maggots. Hanzo took one knee and gently trimmed a square around his plant with his pointed fingertips. He disassembled the furrow more than dug it up, and plucked free a stem of five orange tubers. “I still win,” he concluded, and rolled his eyes at Genji’s ongoing horror. “All you had to do was search the plant’s care on the Net. It was very simple.” He stuck up one forefinger pocked with black soil.

 

Genji turned his back, still traveling the latter stages of grief. When he squeaked a glare at Hanzo, he noticed an oncoming dirty hand, but could not escape the fingers netting his hair. He closed his eye on the side where Hanzo had seized most of him, raising his hands around Hanzo’s wrist. “Don’t be like this weed you planted,” Hanzo growled in his ear. “Growing tall with no substance inside.”

 

“What are you babbling about?” Genji whined. “You aren’t Father.” Hanzo pulled on him, and stopped as he considered the question. Genji attempted to slap him. Hanzo caught his hand.

 

“If I died, and you were made heir, what would you do?”

 

“Why would you ask that? You won’t die.”

 

“What would you _do?_ ” with another tug. This time Genji only laughed.

 

“Buy the bullet train and run away to Tokyo.” He tightened his fingers on his brother’s arm, testing how far Hanzo could be dislodged without ripping out any hairs. His closed eye watered. “I wouldn’t let you die to anything though.”

 

“No? Anything capable of killing me would destroy you, weakling.”

 

“Brother, please…” Genji’s fingers flitted upwards to Hanzo’s clenching knuckles. Hanzo watched him pry at the joints, and let him go. Genji shuddered his eye open, sighing, blinking the haze away. “It would not be that way if you asked.”

 

“How do you mean?”

 

“I know you are angry at Father for making you do stupid stuff like this. For making you train with me, keeping you at my level.”

 

“Unlikely. Just because Father has not helped, it does not mean I have neglected my advancement.”

 

“I feel like I was supposed to be born at the same time as you, but I messed it up and waited a few years. It makes things harder for you.” Genji rubbed the mussed hair on the side of his head, trying to flatten it with his palm. Needles ran through his scalp at any contact, but he could live with it. “But what if Father trains us together not to help me, but to ensure we will work together? When the killers come, it will not be you or me alone. It will be like the brothers in the story…”

 

He had to be careful invoking stories. Hanzo had gotten too old for them. But his brother’s brown eyes shifted aside in thought, and Genji smiled. “What if the goal of this gardening junk was to see if you would help me too? That we would both come out ideal.” Now the eyes widened, glancing at the two plants: the tuber corpses piled below Genji’s, the thick orange specimens lined before his own.

 

Genji’s smile widened to a grin. Hanzo’s face fell. He shut his elegant eyes.

 

“You…” he rasped. “…want me to help you cheat.”

 

“Just give me two, then you still win by numbers,” Genji offered. Hanzo framed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

 

“You say you care,” he hissed. “But your actions have ever been otherwise. Your deceits shall not go unpunished.” He carried the stack of tubers upriver.

 

“You hurt my hair!” Genji cried, balling his hands in front of his chest, legs drawn together. Hanzo paused. Walked back, staring down Genji’s wide, moist gray eyes.

 

He broke off the single smallest of his tubers and held it out. “Thank you Brother!” Genji crowed, seizing the vegetable with both hands and cradling it to his narrow chest. “I will treasure it.” Hanzo rolled his eyes, reluctantly following his running younger brother back to their father.

 

* * *

 

When he woke, the sky was wet grave soil dotted with translucent clamshells. He pulled his hands to his face, scraping at the obstruction. The action of his fingers slowed as he studied the pinheads of invertebrate white bonded to the oozing dirt. He did remember something from school: acid in the ocean, making all the shellfish fragile. At the time, all the story did was make him hungry. As he crooked his fingertips closer to his visor, he could see the white of his own armor, not yet worn thin by the digestive juices of the polluted world.

 

His body started to assume that easy, painless stagnancy. A silver hand slipped around his, wrapping his fingers, giving them a squeeze. Dripping beach sludge from the first contact, the hand resolved toward Genji’s faceplate, rubbing the rest of the dirt from his eyeframe. Mechanical fingertips sketched from his shoulder to elbow, a couple light strokes, like a flower could be raised with just a little water and a tender enough touch.

 

“It rained,” Zenyatta’s voice spoke warmly above him, inviting him out of the mud. “But you would not be moved.” Genji bunched his elbow against the ground and sat up. A can of electronic orange lamplight made a quiet star beside the omnic, taking the place of the sun yet to rise.

 

“Good morning,” Genji murmured, dragging the side of his hand along the cheek of his faceplate. He slouched into Zenyatta’s shoulder. His visual feed panned across a box-shaped game board speckled with black and white stones. An older woman sat at the other side, fully awake and smiling at him in the pre-dawn. Genji perked straight at the sight of her bundled atop a beach towel, a candy-striped scarf flashing around her neck above her windbreaker and jeans. The white panels of the scarf brought out the silver in her hair. The brown skin covering her skinny wrists burnished in the artificial light.

 

“Good morning,” she imitated his Japanese by ear. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” she added in English, their mutual workaround. Her name was Mireille. She had two other robots in her party, Lesette and Esme, yet to emerge from a tent behind the ruff of plantlife separating the dunes from the beach proper. And her grandson, Keandre, undergoing similar incubation in another of the sunflower bubble tents.

 

“Not at all,” he dismissed, getting to his feet. Zenyatta placed a black stone on one of the game board squares, and Mireille couched her chin on her wrist as she considered the patterns in weave. “Excuse me.” Genji showed himself to the border of the sea.

 

Fingers of black glass ran up the sand. Out in the sunless breath of the night, blinking red indicators fixed to windmill blades turned slow Irises on the horizon. The thousand white lighthouses reflected double in the waves, where their dim trunks bent and danced, made gravestone serpentines in the depths. Genji stared at the decorated water; had acid and poison in it, he guessed. Touched the tideline with his foot, and soupy foam brushed over his toe. He scanned for underwater obstructions with his nightvision. He walked into the ocean.

 

With a swipe of his hand, and a splash in the rolling chorus of the waves, mud dropped from his shell like tar cracked from bones. He squatted to duck his helmet under the saltwater, spreading arms flickering beneath the surface. Kicking up straight, Genji met a more substantial wave face-to-face, and the weight of the water lifted him off his toes.

 

He let it bowl him over, circling his hands as he floated on the lip of a current, laughing. A human might have drowned. By the time he returned to Zenyatta and the tourist, the windmill lights were just red spittle in the haze of the rising sun.

 

“I’ll get a towel for you, my darling,” Mireille swore when he showed up at camp dripping, whisking off to her tent while Zenyatta took his turn. Genji wetted a corner of the palm tree print she delivered on his leg, and used it to clean the side of Zenyatta dirtied from touching him. Zenyatta balanced a stone between his fingers while Genji fussed over him, then placed it into an enclave he was constructing in the upper left corner.

 

“You sleep through a storm,” the monk said. “But you wake earlier than you need to. Did your dream trouble you again?” Genji flattened the used towel under his teacher’s shadow, sharing a half-square of it with legs that did not touch ground. He seated himself cross-legged beside Zenyatta.

 

“It was sweet,” he corrected the omnic. Mireille pursed her lips at their exchange, running a white stone over and under the fingers of one hand. Zenyatta held out his arm to the board, and she smiled. “Though to speak of it that way is-- I feel the mud from this beach in my throat. Happy moments come undone a thousand times when you look at them in ‘context’.” A word Zenyatta had taught him for the first time. “It is wrong to accept it the way I see it in my dreams,” Genji concluded.

 

“A moral wrong?”

 

“Just not being true to myself.”

 

“The language you are speaking together, it does not sound like Japanese this time,” Mireille wondered.

 

“Nepali,” Genji offered. He drew his hand up his throat and out. “I am practicing.”

 

“Ah, now that makes sense for a student of the Shambali. Not one of your language packs at birth?”

 

Genji looked at Zenyatta, who remained silent. The cyborg shook his head.

 

“I was designed by a woman, not an omnium,” he explained.

 

“I can believe that.” Mireille smiled, rubbing the stone on her cheek before she leaned forward and placed it.

 

“Her name is Angela,” Genji added after an electric noose in his throat demanded it. Zenyatta glanced at him.

 

“Listen to you! I think my dreams are ended,” the tourist confessed with a grin. Genji cocked his head. “Though I suppose that would be true today anyway.” Mireille held out her open palm, mimicking Zenyatta’s constant offering. “You could still come with us to Shanghai if you like. I would be happy to pay for your room. Lesette has so enjoyed your company. We all have.”

 

Now Zenyatta looked pointedly at him. Genji’s visor flushed lime.

 

“We still have elsewhere to go,” he mumbled. Mireille dropped her hand with a _pap_ against her thigh.

 

“Well, if you change your mind, you just have Zenyatta contact me.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and waved its shiny back at him. Zenyatta nodded to her. A couple two-meter omnics ducked out of a nearby tent flap. They wore airy, translucent scarves, black tanktops tight over their skeletal blue chassis, and slender cornflower jeans hugging their legs.

 

“Has he defeated you too, Mireille?” Esme mourned, squeezing Lesette’s hand.

 

“It is only defeat when I accept it as such,” Mireille sniffed. “The challenge is how little time remains.” She tapped her wrist, a holographic synchro profile sparking momentarily to view. “If we are to keep our shopping itinerary.”

 

“Time is an illusion,” Zenyatta stated. Lesette’s synthesizer snorted.

 

“The fiend is only saying that so he gets more turns to trounce you with. Give it up dear!”

 

“It seems they insist,” Mireille said. “We will improve for our next meeting.”

 

“I look forward to the challenge,” Zenyatta hummed. He turned to Genji as the tourists chatted among themselves about the upcoming day of fashion. Genji tore his visor from their scarves to pay Zen his full attention. “Are you prepared to work?” Zenyatta asked kindly.

 

“Let’s do some yoga today. I feel active.” Genji looked out at the waves crowning white against the shore.

 

“A shame, isn’t it?” Esme rumbled. He was leveling across the water too. “They built an entire farm out there and now they won’t use it anymore. Government is afraid the electrical activity will summon the Beast living out in the East Sea.”

 

“Beast?”

 

“An omnic,” Zenyatta answered before anyone else could.

 

“Nothing proper. None of those Crisis monsters are. It mostly goes after Korea, but I keep scanning the advisory streams just in case.” Esme tapped one of the horn-like antennae sweeping off the back of his head. Lesette pinched one of hers, monocular eye bar dimming. She loosened her scarf and pulled the frail green cloth up over the back of her head, busying herself with adjusting the translucent wreath around her faceplate.

 

“You mentioned yoga?” Mireille segued away gracefully. “You must teach my grandson a pose before we part. Not me though, I am too old.”

 

“You have hardly any gray in your hair,” Genji informed her, deepening his voice, then breaking out a light “Miss!” at the end. Mireille touched her cheek.

 

“All age groups may benefit,” Zenyatta added. “Assuming you are otherwise healthy, Genji can show you some basic positions.”

 

“Me, Zen?”

 

“You know the way.” Zenyatta turned up his palm. “This is another of the myriad paths to learning, my friend.”

 

Genji nodded. Drawing himself tall, he held out his hand to the young grandmother. Her age was in her fingers, he thought as they slipped into his grasp. The skin bunched at the joints but thinned around the bones. He laid his thumb over the back of the metacarpals as he helped her onto her feet, careful not to press. She fidgeted at his touch anyway.

 

“Can you remove your jacket and boots?” he asked, nodding to her.

 

“Certainly,” she giggled. “Lesette, come over and try!” She flapped the emptying sleeve of her jacket at the omnic. Lesette joined them, a half-meter taller than Mireille but tilting her entire body uncertainly.

 

“No Esme?” Genji wondered as he accepted Mireille’s discarded clothing and set it aside from the work area.

 

“Esme is…” Lesette began, playing at removing her scarf.

 

“I don’t believe in that kind of hokey,” Esme grumped loudly behind them.

 

“…stubborn,” Lesette finished, lowering her hand and leaving the scarf in place.

 

“I understand,” Genji laughed. “I was just thinking how it is better not to use the poses Zenyatta and I do, so I will show you one I enjoyed even when I was still unsure if he was just making fun of me.”

 

“Oh no!” Mireille grinned.

 

“Let’s begin,” he commanded, making a confident fist. “Place your feet apart like this, keep your heels down…”

 

“Genji,” Lesette whispered later, as he was holding a hand to her hip and knee, adjusting the angle of her leg. “Your hands are very warm.”

 

“This is all I need,” Esme grunted from a rut in the sand behind them, his voice arriving alongside the odor of burnt eggs. “My Lesette running off with some…yoga instructor.” Genji heard the other omnic’s lens focusing as it fixed on his back. Lesette and Mireille giggled.

 

“Maybe I would not if you would come over and try with me!”

 

“So where is your Angela?” Mireille asked as Genji migrated over to adjust her foundation. He stood behind her back and took her wrists in his hands, widening the spread of her arms over her head.

 

“Geneva, probably.” He tapped her shoulders, reminding her to relax them. The tendons between her elbows and hands stretched beneath her loose skin, blue veins darkening the brown surface. He rested the back of his hand on her ribs, careful to withhold his shuriken from their usual channels between his knuckles as he prompted her chest up and out, so that she lifted her arms straight from her heart. Held the organ over her head. _Angela._ He could smell the strawberry perfume in her hair.

 

“Oh the poor dear. I hope she is alright!” Mireille’s upheld arms trembled, her shoulders bunched despite his best efforts.

 

“Angela is a professional,” he chuckled uncertainly. Lesette turned her bar eye on him while he methodically traced Mireille back to proper posture. The blue light within the lens flickered as she transmitted information somewhere.

 

“Still, that will be a long walk home. I am glad you have a friend for it.” Mireille frowned. “Esme, could you see if my grandson is awake? He does not seem to be responding to the campfire cologne.” Esme looked up from the grill plate he had laid over a cook pit, turning a couple fresh egg whites over before he shuffled off to the second tent. Mireille sighed, the movement of her chest magnified by her posture, which aside from the squirming had become immaculate. “Listen to me, so worked up over the news. Probably not what you wanted at all. Accept my apologies, dear. I am not a very good student.”

 

“This is my first time teaching,” Genji responded, scratching the plates on the back of his neck. “I am probably doing something wrong.” His visor fell away from his prospective students, studying the lands to the west, as a name pulsed again inside him like a heartbeat.

 

Esme returned with a boy that just reached his knee toddling beside him, one hand firmly clasping a juice pouch. Esme tried to wave him over to breakfast, but the boy approached the posed students.

 

“Mamie…” Keandre began, and finished his question in French. “Lesette?” he demanded of the omnic, too.

 

“Becoming strong,” Lesette answered, in English, as a reminder. Keandre caught on.

 

“Looks like a giraffe,” he said, putting his empty juice pouch on the sand. Esme leaned over and picked it up, taking it over to a trash bag by the campfire.

 

“Doesn’t it?” Mireille smiled as she watched the sky past her outstretched hands. She addressed Genji, “It’s his new favorite animal, we fed one at the petting zoo in Guangzhou. They do make a lot of nice colors of them, you can almost do without the real thing.”

 

“Do you know the flamingo? _Flamant?_ ” Zenyatta unfurled from his seat and floated upright beside the boy. Keandre nodded. Zenyatta placed his palms together in front of his chest, and laid one foot against the side of the other leg. The boy studied the robot's architecture, then slapped his hands into alignment and lifted his leg. It took time for him to place his foot on the side of his knee as Zenyatta demonstrated. Mireille and Lesette played at the imitation too, laughing at their own attempts to maintain balance. Genji eyed his teacher a while before smoothly assuming the new stance.

 

Keandre stared at the empty space between Zenyatta’s outstretched toe and the ground. He tried to jump off his one foot to make a better mimic. Unlike Zenyatta, he floated only so far as gravity let him, and a second attempt careened his small body off its heel. Zenyatta separated one hand to press the child’s back, and Keandre did not straighten so much as slow, gliding back to his place on the ground. The monk lined his hands back together. “Now we lift our arms above our head, and we become the flamingo, who is so at peace as to sleep on only one leg.” Keandre mock-closed his eyes, grinning. Zenyatta, his arms a steeple above his statuesque floating figure, tipped his fingers forward. “But the flamingo soon wakes, and is probably hungry.”

 

He pecked the bird’s “beak” at the warm skies. “He puts his foot down to walk to the water’s edge.” Genji understood, and slid his legs down in time with Zenyatta. The monk dropped to the earth, but the contact was a simulation. He would leave no footprint. The tourists followed their lead as they dipped their torsos forward and grazed the sand with the tips of their fingers. “And in the river, he finds many good things to reflect upon,” Zenyatta sighed.

 

Keandre noticed a red ladybeetle strutting across the mud and dropped to his hands and knees to watch it, discipline forgotten.

 

Genji held the position, aside from turning his head to look at the wanderer ever by his side. At first Zenyatta did not greet him, but as Mireille and Lesette gave up the quest, standing and drawing faint westward shadows, the omnic tipped up his faceplate. The tranquil smile at the center stood out. Zenyatta rotated his shoulders and they rose together. Genji turned to the monk, his visor glowing intently in the lavender sunrise.

 

“This flamingo is certainly hungry,” Mireille declared, her voice too a shadow to Genji. She went to check Esme’s progress with their breakfast. Lesette hunkered down to watch the beetle with Keandre.

 

“Genji and I will be working down the beach a ways,” Zenyatta informed the group, though he did not turn from the cyborg.

 

“Please stop before you go, so we can say goodbye,” Genji said. He picked up his swords from where they rested by the tents, bearing the scabbards in each hand.

 

They searched the beach for a flat unadorned by grass or seashells. Eventually Genji devised one by clearing away a scattered curtain of gull feathers. He dropped the swords in a furrow on the edge. Zenyatta laid out his etched omnic spheres in a fire circle beside the weapons.

 

“You were up well before I woke.” Genji crouched, peering at the sun’s diamond glow across the receding tide. “Did you and Mondatta make up the ‘Shambali curfew’ just for me?”

 

“It is an ideal,” Zenyatta chuckled.

 

“What about the flamingo?” He stood, crossing his arms. “You definitely made that up.”

 

“Did I?” Zenyatta landed his sandals to the earth, this time in earnest. He made ripples in the sand as he walked to Genji. The omnic turned his back to the cyborg. Genji imagined he could see the nicks in the red wires where his sword had ground on them. “The objective of teaching is not solely to inform, but to respect the nature of your student. The importance of what you say lies in how you say it, and how well you understand the one to whom you speak.”

 

Genji turned, matching the stature of his back with his teacher. He brought his right leg back, posing his heel against Zenyatta’s. The other knee he bent forward, planting his black metal foot hard on the ground. He moved his fingers in waves against his palms a few times, checking the finesse of the prosthetic motion. “Let us begin,” Zenyatta instructed.

 

He always thought of Zenyatta as small. His age, maybe. The lack of chic battle armor. But when he stood, he was as tall as Genji. When they curved their upper bodies backwards, the hands that met were equals. The only difference from one side of the posture to the other was whose fingers rested on the back of the other’s wrist. Genji’s artificial lungs mimicked the strain a human incurred to pass into the position. Zenyatta was still and steady, gears clicking under his hull.

 

Their faceplates turned to the newborn sky, passing purple to blue overhead, cloudless in the heat. In the past, Genji fed his teacher fitful, gushing praise about the warmth of his arms, and how the structures they made relaxed him more than lying in his bed. Now he only thought of maintaining the pose’s balance, and the synchronous cycling of arms and legs to new positions, limbs nothing but the tools of their selves. On their knees, hanging to each other’s wrists. Crossing legs in the air. The movement of the sun changed the lines of their shadows, suggesting the passage of time, but it was of no import to machines on the edge of the world.

 

“I’m not sure Mamie’s back could take that one,” Mireille coughed nearby.

 

Zenyatta’s face looked over Genji’s, upside-down to him. The omnic did not move at all for the disturbance.

 

“Just a moment,” Genji called to the tourists. He bent his knees in to his chest, sinking the monk’s body back toward earth. Zenyatta’s feet slipped down the back of his thighs, and his toes tipped up as he made contact with the sand. His hands released, his arms sliding straight over his head as Genji let go of his shoulders. He stood, the plates of his spine curving straight, sunlight pouring through the gaps in his waist to mottle Genji with the pattern of him.

 

Zenyatta rose up on the balls of his feet, and pushed off the ground gently to take his throne on the wind, holding thumbs and forefingers together. Genji loosened his legs out straight, arms splayed carelessly on the beach, the ribbon from his helmet a crushed artist’s sketch over his shoulder.

 

“Oh my Genji, you look a little flushed,” Lesette laughed. “Now I see why you are the student.” He turned his visor to her, chest rising and falling its simulated drama, slowing as he noticed Keandre wrinkling little eyebrows at him from beside his grandmother’s leg. When he thought to get up, Zenyatta was already holding out his hand.

 

Once on his feet, Genji bowed to the tourists.

 

“We are grateful to have met you. The travel has been most enjoyable.”

 

“You know it was Esme and Lesette who wanted to tour this country,” Mireille mused, nodding to her friends. “But it is unwise for them to wander about without escorts, so they brought Keandre and I for protection.” Keandre smiled at hearing his name. “My offer to the both of you still stands.” Neither Zenyatta nor Genji spoke. She shook her head, approaching them and patting the backs of their metal skulls. “But if you would have it otherwise, at least be sure to take care of each other.”

 

“Esme said he would take a photo for us, so if you would…” Lesette teased a step forward. Zenyatta nodded to her, and she scooted up next to Genji. Mireille put her arm around Zenyatta, and Keandre stood in front of all of them. Esme stationed himself in a wide-legged stance and his central eye flexed open its aperture, focusing on the scene. Genji held up a V sign as he snuck his other arm around Lesette’s hip.

 

“Here,” Esme grunted, eye light blinking. “An album for you, Zen.” Zenyatta shared the connection with Genji. He posted a couple photos of the cyborg-- meditating on a tree branch, losing Go to Mireille --to the monastery network, with an accompanying message _Look at my wonderful student._ Comments popped up immediately, mostly silver thumbs-up or victory emojis, a few _Very nice_ and _Impressive!_ notes written out too. Genji withdrew from the shared network as it became very sunny inside, and Zenyatta flashed his lights at the departure.

 

“I hope you find what you are looking for,” Lesette offered, studying Genji with her horizontal lens.

 

“And that you can see Angela. She will need the comfort,” Mireille added.

 

Genji hesitated. Mud in his throat. Fire in his belly. The beach swam far away to the ping of a camera shutter. _Angela._

 

“Yes,” he agreed, nodding politely.

 

“Zenyatta, you have our information if you need to contact us.” Mireille touched the featureless bar bicep of Zenyatta’s arm. “For anything.”

 

“Yes,” Zenyatta responded with similar prim curtness.

 

“Buh-bye,” Keandre said, sticking his fat little hand up in a wave. Zenyatta leaned down and waved back.

 

They watched the tourists journey up the beach toward the foggy ghost of Shanghai. Genji magnified his feed of the boy tottering along, the most careless of the quartet, veering in and out of the little waves that burbled up the shore. Eventually Esme bent down and captured him, hauling him up to carry on his shoulders. Keandre shouted about the view, crossing his arms on the smooth blue plate between the omnic’s head projections.

 

Genji and Zenyatta stared at the ocean.

 

“We could swim,” Zenyatta teased.

 

“I wonder why she was so concerned.” Genji heard the side-to-side turns of his helmet ribbon, centering himself on the sound of it caught in the wind while he spoke. “The organization would not bother Angela. She is very important. That is what I always thought.” He opened his right hand and looked down into his palm, clasping his fingers into it. “They wouldn’t be angry with her because of me, would they? My failures are not her fault.” He pivoted his ankle, turning away from the east.

 

“Keep yourself here.” Zenyatta, stationed solidly beside him, even when sand and water mushed together, and the sky stood hollow. Genji shook his head, alarmed. Zenyatta drifted closer, holding a hand over his arm without making contact. “Do not accept an illusion of control.”

 

“I know what you are saying,” Genji gritted out. “No, I know,” he mumbled. He was choking. There was plastic in his throat. _Angela._

 

“You are drawn so far from yourself by a single person.” When Genji did not respond, Zenyatta folded a few fingers across his upper arm. The touch was nothing through his armor. “Genji.”

 

The gauzy bubble over his brain popped. Genji exhaled. It almost came out a whimper, but he cut off his synth. He did not let himself stop being a mute till he was sure words would come out.

 

“Sometimes I try to remember what it is like to be with other people. But that is not what I feel when I think of Angela. Even if…” He touched the low edge of his abdominal plate. Then he looked at Zenyatta’s bare stomach, metal cords around a central segmented pillar. His fingers declined off his armor, dropping back to his side. “I am still dreaming things that don’t make sense. Especially about her.”

 

“Do not be afraid.”

 

The cyborg heaved out a chuckle.

 

“Is that a lesson? Don’t be afraid, or you have failed as a student?”

 

“It is not a lesson. I only mean that I am with you. I am here.” Zenyatta withdrew his opened palms to his lap.

 

“I know." Genji swallowed back the lingering tension in his throat. "I will remember.”

 

“We will work on this more. You must share more about it.”

 

“Sure. When we are done in Japan.” He turned away from Zenyatta, toward the sea. “I like your idea. It is nice to walk there too. Everything is empty, there is no one around. But I do not know how deep it goes.” He shaded his eyeframe with his hand, then held out his arm to the infinite horizon. “If we encountered the Beast, could you talk to it?”

 

“I do not know.”

 

“I wonder if it is one of those god programs. Sounds scary enough. But I bet you could get it to stop bothering people.” He looked at the monk. Zenyatta’s face was turned down at the sand instead of keen to a victory by diplomacy. “Zen,” Genji chirped, and the omnic rose to meet his eyes. Genji pointed south, to a starry, ever-moving constellation of gulls. “We should have begged those tourists for some money. But let’s see what is over there. If there are fishers, maybe one will give us fare for work.”

 

A couple weeks at a small port saw them replacing morning meditation with cleaning piers and decks. Nights were on brick rock cliffs surrounding the port, Zenyatta looking down at the squirming, half-dead piles of fish getting beheaded and scaled, Genji unable to sleep. The ferryman they finally paid kept them out on the deck, even as the ship plowed into thunder and tall, cold waves. Genji was able to dream, one arm locked to a steel holdfast on the inside of the hull, the other wired around Zenyatta as the omnic meditated before him. The ferryman blamed the weather on the Beast.

 

* * *

 

Genji poked his toe into what he thought was a white mushroom cap, but it turned over under his foot into a defleshed mouse skull. No brains inside, but tufts of fur hung off the bottom. An owl got it maybe. There were holes that did not go with the eyes. Ahead of him wound the abandoned tourist track, bounded on each side by lightning strike trees. Zenyatta hovered a couple meters up the road, looking back at him.

 

“I’m coming.” He jogged through the miasma of midday shade from the forest hugging the track, the scantest breaks in the reaching leaves flashing white off his carapace. Zenyatta’s indicators shone a blue aura in the false darkness, traveling beside Genji’s green one. Wind moved out of the trees, channeled down the bald road, and Zenyatta sighed. Or maybe it was just the air whistling between cords and plates.

 

Genji pointed to a gang of white wildflowers surrounding a bare dirt patch. “Zenyatta,” his synth crackled. “Can you wait here for me?” Zenyatta drifted over to the roadside ditch, and as he dropped lower in the air, closer to the flowers, the petals lifted away and revealed themselves to be tiny moths. Most returned to the plants, a few stuck on Zenyatta as he looked around at them. Genji's lips worked to momentary life behind his mask, a small smile.

 

Zenyatta pinched mudras out over his knees. “Inside is my family’s sanctuary,” Genji explained, despite the obvious compliance. “My father said it was where the Shimada became more than wolves.”

 

“Is that your name?” Zenyatta nodded to Genji. “Nice to meet you.”

 

“Nice to meet you,” Genji replied sheepishly, bowing to the relaxed omnic. Zenyatta turned back to the road, metal beads spooling out to their meditative stations.

 

“It is wonderful to be even this close,” he said. “I feel the Iris so strongly here.”

 

“Do you? If we get married, I can bring you inside,” Genji laughed. Zenyatta offered a V sign from his seat.

 

Genji turned to the forest. Birdsong knocked and rattled within, no note connected to any other. He shifted his hand over the hilt of his wakizashi, rubbing his thumb on the braiding, finding his old nervous habit again.

 

He plucked the _Tekhartha_ ID from the wakizashi scabbard and returned to Zenyatta, squatting beside him to offer it. “Hold onto this for me?”

 

The poses of Zenyatta’s hands became stiff and tentative. The mala around him stilled their placid turning. The monk stared up at Genji as he unfolded one arm and took the ID. He keyed it open to its full card shape, and examined the photo he had taken, the text print of the false name. He laid the card on the yellow-clad joint of his knee. “I will be back soon,” Genji promised.

 

“Genji.” Zenyatta had let him stand and turn around before he spoke, and Genji’s shoulders hiked. Then the monk did not say anything more at first, not till Genji’s visor flashed his way. Zenyatta’s back remained to him, his head dipped into peaceful repose. “Eternal happiness is found only in Paradise, and it is not an end to which we strive, but a compensation we tolerate. The goal is never so simple as satisfaction. We must seek balance, and self-understanding. In this way, we find a path to harmony through all the events of our lives.”

 

“I said I would be back soon,” he hissed at the lecture. “Just wait.” He departed into the forest.

 

Pieces of orange tape lapped the forest edge closest to the river. No logos, no text warning of condemned property or earthquakes. Caution, but the crier would not give their name. A few sections of the earth had been overlaid with plastic rope to make grids, some squares chopped up to the clay underlayer, others abandoned. Genji started pulling the tape from the tree trunks. Then he noticed the mounds: statues missing, overturned, broken. Most plots exhumed and empty.

 

Genji ducked under another line of tape and ran south. The excavations only proceeded so far. He looked down at a pile of earth covered in leaves, the wolf at its head undisturbed. He did not touch anything for confirmation, but continued downriver. He followed the flow of the water, trees eating up the bank, save for a clearing gold in the afternoon light.

 

Two plants stood there, the same height, green still and covered with a smattering of flies. The insects dispersed at Genji’s approach. His foot dipped into tender soil by the base of the vegetation. Closer now, he could see the leaves of both plants had started coiling and overgrowing, sawtooth edges gone jagged, the black roots meshing. He ground his toe at the earth in front of the wild stalks, then dropped to his knees before the bloom on the right.

 

No wolves looked over the scene of the cyborg hacking into the ground. He pulled out an urn, and a blue-hilted sword. His fingers could not unwork from the sword hilt for a long time, but when they did he took the jar in both hands and cracked it open.

 

Barely anything inside. He threw the remains in the river, and covered the sword back up with black dirt.

 

He did not touch the second unmarked plot.

 

Genji followed the soft sobs of chimes in the wind back to Zenyatta. He sat on the other side of the wreath of flowers, raising a knee and resting his arms over it. He retrieved his ID from where it still rested on the monk’s folded leg.

 

Tilting his visor, he watched the small, low sun drift between sticky knots of cirrus. Not just autumn, but early in the season. The _pock-pock_ of a tractor engine in need of maintenance flirted with his ears, but it was kilometers away, harvest in full swing for the non-engineered organic garbage they grew between mountains. The sun blushed the horizon, the evening heated up, the sort of thing that would have entailed a dip in the river were it not just a number fluctuating on his sensor feed.

 

“I apologize,” Zenyatta said, orbs drawing in as he rose from meditation, hands steeping in front of his chest. Genji met the gaze of the omnic’s lilting slot eyes. “I presumed too much of your intent without ever asking. I did not respect my student.” Genji’s visor fluttered brighter, a machine smile.

 

“You let your concern get the better of you.” Dragonflies and tufts of pollen cycled past the ditch on a breeze.

 

“Did you find what you needed to?”

 

“I should have known better. I thought that after making it this far, everything would be laid out for me. But I imagine there is only one chance. I will have to wait.”

 

“Are you going to sit there to wait?”

 

Genji shrugged, laughing.

 

“What do you want to do, Zen?”

 

* * *

 

_Hanzo is watching from the shadows..._

 

Navy ink graffiti stained the flank of a column just as they stepped off the escalator into the station. Genji tried studying the text without drawing Zenyatta’s attention. The words faded, the writing years old, but still lurking and waiting for someone besides the salaryfolk and shoppers bustling off to Tokyo. A metro officer eyed him and the swords on his back, thick eyebrows weighing narrowed eyes. Genji lifted his face to the curving arch of the tunnel roof. Touches of cloud smeared his visor feed, a numbness set in his hands. He reached stiffly for Zenyatta’s fingers, and that was a mistake.

 

“No loitering,” the cop boomed in front of him. “You cans have any business here?” Zenyatta went to one of the ticket rechargers, purchasing a couple day passes with their leftover ferry money; it had not been enough to buy them space below decks, but it did save them having to go all the way into Hanamura to look for work. Using one of the fringe stations had been Genji’s idea. It allowed him to show Zenyatta his birthplace, without showing him anything at all.

 

Zenyatta transferred one of the pass codes to Genji, and the tablet in the cop’s hand beeped a couple times. He waved them along.

 

“I thought I would be showing you how to use the machines,” Genji murmured as the bullet train stampeded into the station, slowing off the platform, a meter above its silver track. Cyan window light rippled across their bodies.

 

“I have actually been to Japan before,” Zenyatta admitted as they stepped through the opened sliding doors. “I have even ridden the train.”

 

“What do you call a teacher who has nothing to offer his student?” Genji moaned.

 

“A teacher who is not getting the window seat,” the omnic replied lightly as he considered the available red benches. Genji tensed, and Zenyatta held up his shining hand, carefully tucking it into a fist. A rock. Genji matched the gesture, visor glaring. It was over in seconds, Genji’s deft two-fingered scissors sliding up to gnash toothlessly at Zenyatta’s flat paper palm. He helped himself to the window seat.

 

“I knew you would pick paper. It is the gentlest option.”

 

“I should have known you would go with scissors,” Zenyatta said, settling next to him. “Is something bothering you?”

 

Genji made a gun of thumb and forefinger against his helmet crest.

 

“I’m okay. It was...I let it pass me by.” He slipped his swords over his back into his lap, and tucked his head down between his shoulder and the window glass. He dimmed his visor to signal an oncoming nap. Zenyatta gazed over the obstruction of him at the narrow yellow countryside between bundles of cities, the occasional electronic billboard traveling neon across Genji’s white armor.

 

“Are you sleeping because you find being awake too troublesome?” he asked, before Genji could steal away.

 

“I always used to sleep on the train to Tokyo.” He sat up in his seat. “I liked it because it was slower than jets, and the light from outside comes in on you. It is faster than the car, but the car meant my brother was there. I would try to sleep, and he would wake me up, complain that I was snoring or drooling on myself. I think he just got lonely.” He rubbed one of the helmet’s white spokes. “I don’t snore now, do I?”

 

“You have learned to be a very stealthy sleeper,” Zenyatta’s voice darkened in warning. Genji’s cheeks warmed under his plating. “But none of us are our ideal selves.” The white bar lights on the train ceiling drew lines down his cheeks. “Sometimes my dreams are exhausting.”

 

“What sorts of dreams are those?” Genji cooed, propping himself jauntily upon the windowframe.

 

“Often in the tiring ones, I am not in contact with the earth.”

 

“Um.” Genji eyed the solid few centimeters between Zenyatta and his red train seat.

 

“I see the world below and above me, broken to pieces.” Zenyatta reached past Genji and held his palm beside its reflection in the window. “In the shards I see places I have yet to go, but I know that one day I will look out the window of a train and witness them. And in the dream my destiny is to wade through to the other side, but I do not see you there. I do not see Mondatta, or my brothers and sisters.” His hand rose, miming a circle upon the air, pointing to the center. “But to stay within that world is to be imprisoned by it.”

 

“Even your nightmares are beautiful,” Genji sighed. “What is your body like in the dream?” He had a thought of the robot zipping around a cage, wingless.

 

“I see myself.” Zenyatta looked down his chrome chest, picked up one of his hands in the other and wagged it like a puppet’s. “You mean this?”

 

“Nevermind.” The train swept beneath a bridge. Long blinks of blue light passed them by. Genji strummed the tops of his scabbards, tilting his head down at them, drawing his shoulders in. “The thing bothering me is my brother. I think-- I know he is not here anymore. He has wandered off.”

 

“Is that a problem?”

 

“It compounds my earlier mistake in dealing with him.” Genji wrapped his hand over his right shoulder, moving his thumb along the seam where it joined the red-gray meat of his body. He lifted his head at the sterile beige car ceiling. “And it is not something I ever expected from him. As I knew Hanzo, he would stand inside your dream, look out through the glass, and say ‘good’.”

 

“How fascinating! You must introduce me.”

 

“It is not fascinating for your brother to want you to live in a cage with him,” Genji snapped, visor blackening. “Then once you are gone, for him to leave it, for him to change, as if you could see him now and the argument would not matter.”

 

“People change, my frien--”

 

“They don’t!” Genji seized the side of the monk’s golden jaw. Zenyatta’s hands rose to take Genji’s wrist gently between them. “My dreams lie to me. I cannot see any place I will go like you do. Everything in this life is just echoes of what came before. Without him, I am only acting. Without him, I am forever lost.”

 

Sunlight peeled them out of the tunnel. The other passengers were staring at Genji. An omnic with a pyramidal head like iridescent china squeezed the seat in front of her, her lights keening red on him. Genji tore his hand loose of the monk’s face, out of his warm fingers.

 

Zenyatta was silent. Genji risked a look through his peripheral. Zenyatta’s lights fluttered slightly, transmitting. “What are you doing?!” he snarled, shrinking away from the unspoken exchange, nailing his shoulder to the window. The iron plate turned on him, all nine lights sharp and steady blue.

 

“Not me," he insisted. "Mondatta.”

 

And Zenyatta offered the connection freely to him. Genji's visor flickered out, that bad old habit, but he took the omnic's hand.

 

_m.o.n: The Petras Act has been signed into law. Overwatch has no further power to confront us. Please accompany me to the U.N. over the coming days, if only to give me your thoughts while the ashes settle._

_Z_E_N: I am not finished here._

_m.o.n: I expected that answer._ Weariness and laughter both punctuated the multimedia of his messaging.

_karroten: What happened to Overwatch?_

_m.o.n: Disbanded. There have been many arrests. Further activity is illegal._

Genji's body was a wire, spitting and smoking. He stood up, hands braced on the seat backs around him, the other passengers ogling again. Scenery blurred behind his tall silhouette, melted ahead of his visor out the other window. The world shrank, colorless and tight. _Angela._

 

_karroten: Where is Dr. Ziegler?_

Mondatta sent a file with his next message: _CASREPORT-GENEVA_INCIDENT.omn._

 

_m.o.n: She has been on the missing persons list since the destruction of the Swiss headquarters._

Genji examined the file: Angela Ziegler, missing. He hung on the second word, like he could not even get his processor to change the pane to the next name. His body electrified, the hold broke reluctantly.

 

Gabriel Reyes, deceased. Ana Amari’s name was grayed out. WINSTON, missing. John Morrison, deceased.

 

Zenyatta’s hands drew close to his shoulders. Genji shook off his airy touch, consulted the file again.

 

_karroten: Where is Jesse? He might know where she is. The rest of these are dead or missing._

_m.o.n: Jesse?_

_karroten: Jesse McCree._

_m.o.n: He is not listed as an Overwatch agent._

_Z_E_N: Genji is not listed either._

_m.o.n: Genji, a Net search indicates Jesse McCree is a wanted criminal. Recent reports place him as inheritor of an American-based syndicate called the Deadlocks._

_Z_E_N: Does that seem accurate?_

_karroten: It doesn’t matter. Where are the Deadlocks?_

_m.o.n: New Mexico in the United States seems to house their base of operations. The American government has pledged to launch a counteroffensive soon if these news reports are correct._

_karroten: Mondatta, let me borrow your ship._

_Z_E_N: Genji._

_m.o.n: The older craft is available… I apologize Genji, I leave this decision to Zenyatta._

The omnic monk stood clear and silver before Genji. The train was oozing, the seats looked like blood under his hands, but Zenyatta was there. Genji leaned forward, his green light leveled with the omnic’s slots.

 

"Take me," he demanded in a robotic snarl.

 

“I do not see how this path will bring you peace.”

 

“Angela is in trouble.”

 

“Your brother…”

 

Genji’s head veered down, shaking from side to side, snapping back up at the monk.

 

“I know how to find him. I told you he doesn’t matter. This has nothing to do with him.”

 

“But we have traveled all this way. I think he matters very much. He is eating at you. And the distance between you and her is too vast, but I fear you cannot--”

 

“Are you helping me or not?” Genji demanded. “ _Angela_ needs me.”

 

“Why have you become so fixated? Genji, you are my dear friend--”

 

“Why do you ask so many questions? Have you never loved anyone before?”

 

“Love…?” Zenyatta finally ceded a couple centimeters to the looming cyborg, making space between their faceplates, his signal lights at their brightest setting.

 

“I will do this without you," Genji decided. "It is better. But I told you it would end this way before. You will not see me again, ‘Master’.” He clasped his hand dagger-like over Zenyatta's shoulder, intending to pull him from his path.

 

“I will help you.” Zenyatta touched the side of Genji’s helmet. Then he floated down to his seat, indicators shadowed. Genji listened in as he sent confirmation to Mondatta, arranging for the ship to meet them in Tokyo.

 

Genji let himself down, accepting that jumping out and running would not be faster than the bullet. The melting world dried. Turned saccharine even: he could see the sun making playful bursts through treelines, blackbirds streaming away from the serpent whistle of the train. A steady pump of confidence welled somewhere behind his eyes. With a ship at his disposal, he could get the information he needed quickly. He could wring it out of Jesse. He could find her. She would be safe. His fingers twitched over his sword scabbards, his whole body unwinding, a single long tendon collapsing after a stretch. _Angela._

He identified a video file in the CASREPORT. A drone copter circled the wreckage. The administrative building had been popped open, a frame of rubble its only mark of prior existence. The dome of Winston’s greenhouse was littered with holes, lattice frame slowly bending down under its own weight. Body parts smeared the chunks of concrete and metal at the outskirts. Yellow-robed first responders and drones picked along the thinnest layers of debris, many days of digging ahead, same as any archeological treasure, but with the mummies still crying inside.

 

The segmented red cross of the medical wing had been torn in half, the walls on one side gone, floors collapsed over each other like sagging gray pancakes. Genji played the stream footage over and over again, zooming in on bloody hands and shoeless feet to read the prints of ghosts he once knew.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : Let us welcome our guests.
>   * _piman_ \- Japanese word for green (immature) bell peppers
>   * _flamant_ \- French word for flamingo
>   * _mamie_ \- French nickname for a grandmother
>   * _Go_ \- as in the board game, not the thing with Pokemon ;P
>   * One of the charming things about reused assets in the game is that Hanzo and Genji have the exact same sword on Hanamura and Nepal respectively. It even has the same piece missing. 
>   * _半蔵が影から見ている_ \- "Hanzo is watching from the shadows", a piece of graffiti you can find on the Hanamura map in the alleyway to the right of the arcade spawn 
>   * This chapter was a bit delayed, the next one may be even more so. This is due strictly to my job being a bear right now. I'm sorry!!
>   * At the risk of having a tag forest, I have finally added relationship tags, as I feel they will only become more important.
>   * I also added a character tag for Hanzo.
>   * With the release of the "Uprising" comic, this story is no longer canon-compliant. The chief discrepancies are in Chapter 2, but I also need to make adjustments to timing of events (this is why I talked about mostly using fuzzy timing in the first place back in the notes on Chapter 2!) and personality for the early sections. I don't think this is something impossible to overcome with a rewrite, but currently I am focusing on future chapters. I may go back at the end to do a rewrite. This also depends on whether any further lore around the story of "Uprising" is released when the event starts this Tuesday, like if they decide Overwatch blew up not 5 years ago but 7 years ago. Don't take my fic worries to mean I'm not down though, I am super excited for more lorezzz always. I think it's pretty cool that some things I have written about in this story are actually in the canon as well.
>   * Speaking of lore, what's with the unprompted release of Genji/Hanzo's dead dad's name? Cool though.
> 



	12. Cactus

 

The dirt was tomato red, but the dust twining with the wind was gold. Gleaming fog frothed between shadowy mountains, obscuring every horizon.

 

Red and gold had scratched into Zenyatta’s fingers. Genji saw the bloody sunspot traces when the monk raised a palm toward him. Zenyatta cocked his other arm back at his side, locking his elbow, twisting his wrist to the sky. A ripple of pistons converted his hand to a fist. Genji wondered what he had been digging for. His own milky reflection fanned an arm across the spot remnants of an oasis, nocking two black-and-white fingers skyward, and curling them back toward his body in invitation.

 

Zenyatta struck for the slit padding of Genji’s ribcage with an arm of flashing silver glass. Genji rotated his armored triceps into the blow and the glass became steel on impact, pinning his arm to his side. Zenyatta’s hand flowed down the caged appendage and snapped onto the armor gap at the inner elbow with a lightning strike of industrial pressure.

 

Genji set his heels deeper in the sand, breathed out. Pushed his leg out like a hedgehog barb, black foot driven to the golden polygon target at the center of Zenyatta’s chest. Zenyatta released his arm, absolved his own body of tension that would fight the force of the kick. He turned in the air, but remained standing on the clifftop wind.

 

“When we act together, does your body feel less of a stranger?” he asked. Digital memory of the pressure at his elbow colored Genji’s stance. As he focused on breathing past the tension in his arm, he became aware of the rise and fall of his chest beneath his taupe wrapping. Chugging pangs of electricity in his arm faded into smooth streams around his polymer bones, sparking as he studied Zenyatta’s fingers and floating stance for predictive ticks. The wind changed between them, flowing at his back, pressure receptors awake after the jab to his arm.

 

“I am supposed to be teaching you,” he protested when Zenyatta refused to indulge his defense, visor a green lash throbbing in his faceplate. Zenyatta swooped for his frustration: a sandal tied in red string rocketed between them, higher than Genji’s own aim, different technique. It knocked the jut of his chin even as he curved over backwards to avoid it, and all he could see were the black clouds piling over the mesa. He caught himself on his right heel and stood straight. “Not good enough!” he challenged.

 

Zenyatta allowed him back in. His hand rose to a feint Genji darted at his shoulder, and missed the sweep of Genji’s leg into his knees. He collapsed over the blow, near weightless like a dry leaf, faceplate swinging within centimeters of the mesa top. His skinny arms paired in front of his chest, fingers extended in a warrior’s sigil at the dirt. Zenyatta’s false smile shined upside-down at Genji.

 

Genji eased away to let him up.

 

The mala orbiting Zenyatta sped their circle, one spitting open its etched ports to unleash a blue-white luminescence that hardened down Zenyatta’s arm. He turned up his hand at Genji, and the light sprang out spherical into the cyborg’s chest. Impact meaty as a kick, sinking past his armor, crackling up the wiring of his spine. His well-meaning retreat became a stumble, holding his hand over the strike as Zenyatta rotated upright. “Cheater,” he snarled in delight, clicking three shuriken into his right hand.

 

“This excites you.”

 

“I enjoy the conversation.” Genji swiped his talons. Zenyatta bent to evade, but lacked speed, a blade edge opening a third dark eye in his faceplate. His fingers slid up to the linear hole, fingertips grazing the ragged metal.

 

“Perhaps…this language is not my strong suit?”

 

“You surprise me.” Genji slipped another trio of shuriken between his fingers. “And it is so unlike sparring with my brother. He always did what you would expect, the most efficient action.”

 

“Was it very easy to achieve victory over one so predictable?”

 

Genji restrained his shuriken, straightening his spine as a cool solar glint passed through the clouds to him, colored him a dove on a perch. Upright, off-balance, knowing he should find his defense. Relaxing within his shell.

 

“Never.” He watched Zenyatta drift into a full-bodied kick. His sandal toe touched into Genji’s stomach like a feather, dented his whole body backward. The only resistance Genji could not deny was the twitch of his hand toward a wakizashi he did not have equipped. Zenyatta guided him past the tipping point, then made a graceful backward crux of his outstretched leg and allowed Genji to fall the rest of the way to earth on his own. Genji startled at the loud chatter of his armor on the dusty stone, but the impulse passed by the time his body bounced still.

 

He tipped his head back at the slender line of the cliff, his helmet ribbon blowing off the side of it. “I never beat him.” Something juvenile made him raise his head, a protest like a spasm, soon gone: “Not in any way that mattered.” His right hand relaxed, shuriken tilting out of the programmed clutch of his fingers. Zenyatta was not part of the dark sky he could see from where he lay, but a windy ring suggested the monk was retrieving the stars he had thrown before. “I never thought about it like that before-- _predictable._ ”

 

Zenyatta bent into view. He laid the lost weapons in a precise stack beside Genji’s arm. Genji took his hand and they stood up together, though Zenyatta’s legs soon tucked under him and dropped his relative height. Genji touched the side of his teacher’s face. “Is it too much damage?”

 

“It will repair.”

 

“Never gets everything.” Genji poked his finger along a white scar shot clear over Zenyatta’s signal lights. He flattened his palm to the monk’s forehead, stroking over the top and cupping the back as he had seen Mondatta do. Zenyatta tilted under his hand.

 

“Impermanence is a truth for all of us. I am pleased you have rediscovered your patience. Mornings should belong to you, not your quest. And this new meditation is…stimulating.”

 

“I thought it was important that I teach you, before we run into Jesse’s thugs. But I learned something.” Genji patted the omnic. “It makes me happy.” Zenyatta’s indicators brightened, blue stars in the growing dark.

 

“What did you learn?”

 

“You are not gentle.” Genji circled his arms around the omnic, linked against his back. “You do not think like a child.” Zenyatta touched one of the broad chrome wings guarding Genji’s shoulderblades, stroking the armor to the ports over the cyborg’s spine. He held his warm hand over the glowing ring caps, echoing the good will.

 

“Pain can be useful,” he thought aloud. Genji leaned into his embrace, burrowing the nose of his helmet at the side of Zenyatta’s head. Zenyatta stilled his hand against Genji’s armor, and Genji eased his face away as he realized the omnic had stopped speaking. He lifted himself out of the hug, and Zenyatta followed his retreat with the emotionless, bird-like angling of his face.

 

“I only feel pain when I am about to break,” Genji answered the silence, synthesizer notes dull and crackling now. He crouched to the smattering of water at one side of their battlefield, and wrapped his hand around a paddle of cactus. “I think…I asked Angela to make me that way.” He pressed his thumb into a thorn, and it was the thorn that broke. Yellow flowers bloomed on the cactus tips. “But when I am working with you, there is something different about this.” He touched his chest. “Like I can hear myself inside. We fight, but it is not like being someone’s sword.”

 

“Your body is not a weapon.” The monk sounded cheerful. Genji kept rubbing the cactus leaf between his fingers.

 

“Maybe.” He saw Zenyatta’s reflection approaching in the water. He dropped on his rear and stretched his ankle out into the oasis as Zenyatta floated down to a seat beside him. Zenyatta weaved the scuffs from his white stomach and shin with a pass of golden light, the body of each wound blossoming out of his armor before it dissipated. Raindrops speckled their faceplates and Genji groaned up at the sky. “Why is it raining here?” he argued with the bellyful of navy clouds. A downpour answered, not just on the mesa, but in thick fingers across the desert below.

 

 _Even a cactus does not live on its strength alone,_ Genji mocked up in his head for his teacher’s likely sentiment. _But it can go forth on a single tear._ For his part, Zenyatta did not speak, not even to divulge the meteorological quirks of American deserts. The oasis puddles transformed, flowing around them to plunge off the mesa top.

 

Lightning pricked across the overcast, gold and green, silent at first, power without grievance. Traditional white spikes joined and thunder soon muttered in Genji’s ear. He ducked the side of his head against his shoulder. The impromptu waterfalls flooded earthy footprints at the mesa bottom, rectangular contusions the size of train cars snaking west. The blooms of dust that made the distant miles unknowable began to drown.

 

When Genji looked at Zenyatta, the monk’s face was fixed across the thin sheen of the oasis, and water leaked from his eyes. “I am sorry for yelling at you before. You know this is only so I can find Angela.” Zenyatta’s head turned to him. Rain pooled off the orbs around his head in heavy drops. “But this feels right. I am on the right path. Angela will be fine, and when you meet her, you will see what kind of person she is.”

 

“I am eager to learn.”

 

The sky above their heads erupted, formless and silver, the thunder an immediate, ground-shaking slap. Genji struggled his arms and legs into a meditation instead of the instinctive ball against his torso, and weathered the noise. There was nowhere to hide on the mesa top. He noticed Zenyatta looking straight up into the storm.

 

“Afraid it is going to strike?” he chided in an anxious warble, left arm quivering as he held two fingers below his chin.

 

“It always will,” Zenyatta replied calmly. “Still, there is an energy flowing through me that did not before.” He turned his right hand up to copy Genji’s mudra. “Is it fear? Or the will to show you I am not defenseless?” His slot eyes fixed on Genji. “Or is it enjoyment of this moment with you, here and now? So many things I do not know. So many you have yet to teach me.”

 

“Zen…” Genji swallowed, his synth thickening his words accordingly. “You are always so honest.”

 

Off in the mist, an explosion lit a torch seventy meters in the air. Beneath the newborn flame, patters and pops sharper than rain strikes whispered within an unseen structure. Pinpricks of light glittered in the haze, more reports cracking across the atmosphere.

 

“Gunfire,” Zenyatta concluded.

 

“It is Jesse. I recognize the way he talks.” Genji got up and crept to the cliff edge, balancing on his fingers and toes, bowed over like a cat. “Damn! I didn’t think those police would reach him before I did.” He and Zenyatta had spent a day sneaking around a blockade of black and blue armored cars and people in bulletproof vests to access what was formerly a state park. Drones and small airships stenciled _FBI_ waited with the army of police _._ The park was dedicated to rocks; several wedge-shapes jutted out of the valley below the mesa. They had already walked past an entire city of rocks, two and three stories tall, smashed by the same track they had been following to find Jesse’s hideout.

 

Genji looked back at Zenyatta. The omnic’s lights went weary, dim. “We need to get moving.” He stood and collected his swords from a rocky nail by the water. “Carry them for me?” he asked Zenyatta, who nodded. Genji loosed the nanomagnetic tether anchors from the back of his armor and affixed the accessories to his teacher, then mounted the sword hulls on him. He got down on one knee before him. “I will carry you,” he explained.

 

Skinny arms tucked over his shoulders, embracing each other in front of his neck.

 

Genji became part of the circle of etched omnic spheres as he examined the wet red face of the mesa. When he descended, the omnic at his back bobbed against him weightlessly, offering only the slight tug Genji associated with his own weapons. A click at his right told him Zenyatta was resting his faceplate on his shoulder. “Are you tired? Don’t let go.”

 

“I am imitating being tired while I think.”

 

“It doesn’t work if you tell me.” Genji canted a fond green flash over his shoulder at the monk. His fingers clawed through the water and surface clay to keep a steady grip down the cliff. When they reached the newly formed arroyos at the bottom, chunks and smears of red painted their bodies.

 

The rain slowed. Mist rolled away from the folded legs of a giant automaton fallen to the valley. White print along its corroded flank read _PEGASUS,_ but Genji thought it looked more like an eagle with a broken back. Its corroded hull shaped a crescent moon with one sharp tip evolved to a tower. The reaching neck ended in a headless box and a recently conceived eye of flame that steamed profuse white in the mumbling rain. Long cannons drooped off its sides into the dirt, and tangled networks of spires broached off its back, wings broken over and over again. Open shins on its politely tucked limbs exposed lines of armored treads, letting it at one time crawl through the sand.

 

By the time they reached the base of the structure, it had been silent for a couple hours. Its beaten brown metal warmed under the watery pink slick of sunset, blotted clouds turning the fringe of the solar disc gauzy and polluted.

 

Defunct sensory wires coiled around Genji’s feet as he walked near, appearing from the scrub in iridescent coils that searched reflexively before falling back to their graves. Bastion parts stuck out of the sand by a ramp into the Pegasus’s belly. An intact Bastion sat as a man might on the ramp itself, a pair of sunglasses tied over its single dark indicator light with wire.

 

Genji peered into the black hole at the top of the ramp, but the only thing he noticed was a couple fresher and meatier corpses. He tapped up the ramp quietly as he could, ducking as he approached the shade of the omnic’s nether juts and ports. He ended up crouching over the fallen men, brushing ants away from the ear of one before he thought better of it. He lifted off the man’s broad white hat, studying the neat hole between his open eyes. The underside of the hat was stained pink. Pieces of the victims fanned out on the walls above each of their posts.

 

“Would police leave their victims like this?” Zenyatta asked him, hand floating up to but not touching a Rorschach of blood on a grate.

 

“I heard American police might. But none of their vehicles are here.” He moved away from the corpse to retrieve his swords from the monk’s back. Zenyatta’s fingers kept searching the air above the walls, settling to the power line beside an exposed, inactive light bulb. The coils inside the bulb heated white, showing off a couple more dead men further down the hall, then the effect faded when Zen dropped his hand. “Do you have nightvision?” Genji tapped the side of his green eyeframe.

 

Zenyatta shook his head.

 

“Not anymore.”

 

“Turn your lights all the way up.” The hallway glowed in their blue-green sheen. Every side room, every nook hid another body. A shirtless omnic lay across the breadth of a doorway, his loose arm stretched at the wall. Open eagle wings connected to a rattlesnake on his back. His reaching hand did not end in fingers, but stiletto-like claws. The back of his head was nothing but frizzy red wiring, the skullplate blown out by the gun blast. Genji touched the back of his own helmet.

 

He thought the Pegasus was a mountain. That the answers, inscribed in metal, would lie at the top. The fire in the leviathan’s eye had gone out, but the stench became an tactile experience. The wanderers laced in black ash atop their coats of clay, and beneath the smog found the body of a boy not more than sixteen or seventeen.

 

The black flirt of a beard made the point of his chin. He had been shot in the chest rather than the head, and his eyes were shut as if he had fallen asleep. Blood dried in bubbles around his grit teeth. His was the only corpse that still had weaponry on it, a small pistol lying beside his stiff hand, a single shot discharged.

 

Around the boy lay technology, computers, tablets wired to the walls. Genji and Zenyatta left, double-checking each room on the way down. Zenyatta pried open the side ports in each cleared cell and wind whistled lonely through the Pegasus shell. They stood beside each other at the top of the entry ramp in confusion, the earliest bodies beginning to fry by their feet.

 

With the air moving around the machine’s veins again, Genji detected a scent. He filtered out the blood and the smoke and examined his olfactory feed a second time. Like a seismograph peak: alcohol. His visor dimmed, and Zenyatta looked over at him. “I found Jesse,” he said, transmitting the relevant data, though the source he had to track for up and down the hallway.

 

“Genji.” Zenyatta curled his fingers around a panel of white insulation lying against the side of the corridor. Other pink fingerprints scattered across the insulation surface. Zenyatta pulled the panel out and laid it down on the floor quietly, like any worthy ninja’s apprentice. An access hatch stuck a few centimeters ajar beneath, stained dark along its lower rim. When they creaked the door open, a staircase tunneled away from them into secret depths.

 

Genji went first, and found a room couched with cheap cots, the dead resting in some of them. One was full of all the missing guns, grenades, and other contraband. A small generator puttered next to a barred window in the corner. On a bulletin board above, someone had tacked post cards from different cities in New Mexico. Looked alphabetical, some spaces blank where the right card had never been collected. The alcohol smell burned sweet under the frame of an iron door past the incomplete lives of the Deadlock Gang.

 

He listened to the gap beneath the door: muffled wheezing, one left alive. Motioning Zenyatta to take cover in a corner, he pulled down the door handle and let it creak open on its own. When the room beyond remained still, he poked his soiled head out for a look.

 

A square of open sky fitted with a bug screen lit most of the room, the only competition a wall monitor set to a music app-- currently on mute. The shadow of a ruby armchair loomed before the rectangular screen. A fridge and hot plate, along with a dining table as empty of food as it was of souls stood at the far corner. Another, lower table made accessory to the armchair, stocked with open liquor bottles. A three-leafed fan turned weakly by the window. Familiar coughs shook the cramped air.

 

Genji circled through a leaf pile of bloody bodies surrounding the armchair. McCree lay cast toward the whiskey table, the record of his doubled-over torso obscured beneath a ragged black cloth. Armor streamed out beneath, metallic boots akimbo across the floor, one spur cracked clean off. He stirred as Genji blocked the light from the monitor.

 

The bullet-laced hat rose, and eyes opened that were not bright, but full of bloodshot. Glassed over, unfocused, the eyes of a corpse inexplicably moving. The lids doubled and wrinkled, bagged tiredly against the sockets. Hair grew in shreds around the frame of his face, darkening under the left corner of his lips. He gasped desperately as he came alert, and with the lift of his head came the rise of the sixshooter clutched tight in his right hand. He set the iron mouth to the heart of Genji’s mechanical chest.

 

Genji looked down at the barrel, then up at the man, unmoved, visor glaring. McCree fumbled at the revolver hammer. He leaned forward, the fenced sunlight catching in the dark of his eye.

 

“Genji.” McCree’s arm relaxed, though the gun did not move away. His chapped lips trembled apart, silent at first, wetting eyes moving up and down Genji’s face and chest. McCree blinked and a tear traced the broken down geography of his cheek. “You alive?” the cowboy croaked out. Genji tensed only when McCree started struggling out of his seat, set back somewhat by the wash of blood loosed from somewhere on his side, staining the chair fibers brighter.

 

“Genji.” Zenyatta had joined them at the armchair’s right side. “He seems--” The pupils of McCree’s eyes shrank to hard pinheads. He swung his Peacekeeping arm at the omnic, aiming direct between the nine blazing lights.

 

It was just his hand making a gun puppet, fingers emptied of their deadly force. McCree stared at his disarmed appendage, searched back toward Genji.

 

The revolver hit him across the face.

 

The cyborg shoved his hand under the brim of the hat, pulling up the wide-eyed head forced to the side by the blow. McCree blinked water and pink from his eyes, tongue running across the fresh blood all over his upper lip. He gave up lapping the wound and spit it out against his clothing. Looking up at Genji, the set of his eyes eased, gauzing over. He smiled, teeth red.

 

“That’s the way.”

 

Genji swung the gun in again, breaking the cowboy’s nose. Another strike and the Peacekeeper fired off, bullet ricocheting around the smoky interior, and McCree’s eyes rolled up to nothing but white. Zenyatta shoved his entire body between the two of them, grabbing Genji’s wrists.

 

“ _You don’t know what he did!_ ” Genji screamed, fighting his restraints.

 

“Does this action change what he did?”

 

“I don’t care!”

 

“Even so, I will not allow you to continue hurting yourself.”

 

Genji tried to turn the gun around, the light of his visor blazing green over Zenyatta’s faceplate. “You would have to tell me,” the omnic said. Genji paused his fight to the level the barrel past Zenyatta’s shoulder. “What he did. You would have to be honest with me, too.”

 

The lights over Genji’s body dissipated to whispers. He began to withdraw his head. Zenyatta dropped the hand holding the gun and clasped the back of Genji’s helmet, knocking the formidable crested headguard to his array of ash-choked lights.

 

“It hurts.” He felt stupid, a child for saying it. There were no wounds in his body. Stupid, holding this gun and trying to shoot a dead man. Dishonored. He pressed his faceplate against Zenyatta’s, a tinfoil scrape in the air. The Peacekeeper he lowered to his hip, held it only so it would not fall to the floor and go off again.

 

“It is alright to be angry.” Zenyatta dropped one of his hands to the armrest of the chair, and pushed himself off the collapsed man Genji had forced him against. “But we do not strike others for this reason.”

 

“Next you are going to tell me to stop pulling my brother’s hair,” Genji groaned. Then he choked on a laugh. “He does it to me too, just never where you can see.”

 

“Good,” Zenyatta said of the wretched noise, voice ever softer. “For now we focus on becoming calm, so we are prepared for whatever lies ahead. But we will speak later, I promise, Genji.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Zenyatta patted the back of his helmet, and he heard the xylophone of metal fingers. He nudged his faceplate aside, cheek-to-cheek with the monk, but stiffened as he saw the cowboy anew.

 

“What is it?” Zenyatta asked.

 

“His arm.”

 

Zenyatta turned, considering McCree, whose face had bloomed out like a rose. The cowboy’s left arm draped heavy over the whiskey table, a dirty line of interconnected metal fragments gleaming in a pool of a broken glass. Genji bent to lay the Peacekeeper in the blood on the floor, and then he reached past his teacher to lift back the rotten cloth sloughed from McCree’s shoulders. The robotic arm terminated at his elbow. Genji scraped the sleeve tucked into it, prying the fabric back to make sure. Metal met flesh scarred white and gray, the skin at the border rough and puckered.

 

After examining the long-toothed skull painted on the prosthetic’s forearm, Zenyatta drew some of his energy free of an orb and fixed it to the fallen body. “You should not touch him,” Genji complained, though he eyed the blood dripping off the cowboy’s chin onto the top of his breastplate.

 

“There is danger of death otherwise,” Zenyatta explained, and showed Genji to an incomplete clot on McCree’s stomach, gushing more heavily than his face. Something tomato red stuck out from severed skin. Genji turned away, synthesizer hissing wordlessly. He stalked over to the monitor and switched off its nonsense electronic light, silencing the room to just the sunlight from the makeshift window.

 

He returned to mostly bloodless clothing on McCree, and crouched to stare at the flesh of the man’s bisected arm. The wrinkles along the outside of the stump did not change for Zenyatta’s influence, except to lose some of the dry, scaly patching at the fringe of the prosthetic.

 

“Can you heal him being drunk?” Genji rubbed circles over his left arm. “It is just a kind of poison, isn’t it? That would save us some time.”

 

“Intoxication seems to be his desired state,” Zenyatta said.

 

Jesse McCree moaned his way to wakefulness, coughing heavily the first time he tried opening his eyes. He sagged against his seat back, and Zenyatta withdrew the orb. The cowboy looked up.

 

“Well hey beautiful,” he sighed, voice gravelly and warm. “Aren’t you shiny as a new spur?” Zenyatta was covered in the ashes of the Pegasus and the monsoon sludge of the surrounding wasteland. “Hey…” McCree continued on his own time. “Ain’t I seen you somewhere before?”

 

“We have never formally met.”

 

“Must be my imagination. Anyway, you might not have picked the best time to come ‘round.”

 

“He is still drunk,” Genji informed Zenyatta.

 

“Genji…” McCree put his elbows on the armrests and nudged himself up. He searched Genji’s armor, the cool green light of his visor. “You there?” Genji looked at Zenyatta, who tipped his head at the cowboy. Genji nodded to McCree. “And what, you got…you got a friend?” McCree glanced at Zenyatta a second time, evaluating his semi-clothed person. His eyebrows wrinkled, he frowned, but it was relief that came spilling out of him bold and loud: “Oh thank God! Or the Iris, whatever ya wanna call it. One ‘a you found him.”

 

He took off his hat, blood dragging down the split ends of his hair; it could not be healed away because it did not belong to him. “Thank you so much…”

 

“Where is Angela?” Genji interrupted.

 

“That someone I know?” McCree poked his finger through a bullet-hole on the hat brim. Genji cut the space between them and leaned down faceplate to face.

 

“Dr. Ziegler.”

 

“Oh! Mercy… Jesus, what does she have to do with you being here? And why’re you both covered in dirt?” McCree reestablished his place in the bloody room with a visual survey. “Matter of fact, you oughta get out of this place.” He started to get up and Genji slammed him back into his seat with a palm to his chest.

 

“Where is she?”

 

McCree scowled down at the restraint. He cocked a brow at the cyborg.

 

“How the hell should I know?”

 

“I see it in your eyes.” Genji loomed over the other man.

 

“Too bad you’re an idiot at being a ‘bot, or you would know already.” McCree fished through the glass on the table for a phone in a black leather safety case. He used it like a remote to activate the monitor, minimizing the music app and bringing up a feed that had been humming in the corner. “Just load up the news. She was already yapping away when I got here, looks like she’s still at it.”

 

Dr. Angela Ziegler stood at a podium on the screen, talking to a white-robed audience beneath a blue sky.

 

“Why does she look like that?” Genji walked to the screen, touching the pale face emerging tomb-like between strands of platinum. The doctor’s cheeks pronounced their bones from the skinny well of her jaw, her hair hung flat and unstyled.

 

“I’m sure she’ll pop back up once they sprinkle water on her or somethin’. Opening a hospital next week, lotsa stress. Doc Z never needed the old O-W to be a celebrity,” McCree grumbled. Genji heard his metal hand clinking around the cracked booze bottles, picking one up. Then came the puff of a flame, and the drag on a cigar before the cowboy took another throaty sip. “You still chasing her?” he crackled at Genji’s back.

 

Genji ignored him for the stream. McCree pinched the bridge of his newly healed nose as he swallowed, and drooped his cheek to his dusty black shoulder, eyeing Zenyatta from under his hat. The omnic floated beside his chair, watching Genji absorb the monitor pixels. McCree drank his cigar, spit out a cloud of blue fumes. “You ever get back home and kill Hanzo?”

 

Zenyatta’s faceplate twitched sharp to him, then out at Genji as the cyborg turned around. McCree smiled, sinking into his chair. Zenyatta drifted closer to his student.

 

“That is your goal in Japan?” he asked. The white light of Angela Ziegler flowing around his shoulders, Genji raised his visor to glare at McCree.

 

“Jesse, do you ever do the right thing?”

 

“I wouldn’t be the one to ask,” McCree wretched through his drink, laughing.

 

“Genji.”

 

Genji stared at the Shambali. Zenyatta’s hands fanned out over the bend of his knees, and he lifted his faceplate.

 

“Yes,” Genji answered.

 

“Didn’t tell ya, huh?” McCree swept up the silence with his drawl. “In case you didn’t read your instruction manual, here’s a tip.” He pointed at Genji with the neck of an empty whiskey bottle. “He lies, and he hides. It’s damn near constant. Since he seems to be on his feet, I’m not sure a venerable person such as yourself ought to get any more involved. Hanzo is the one that did it to him.” He gestured to Genji’s whole body. “So he’s got nothin’ but vengeance in his heart, and has never cared about anything else, except maybe stalking his doctor.”

 

“I’ll kill you,” Genji swore. He was reaching for his sword. “I’ll kill you, Jesse!” Zenyatta ignored his outburst, regarding McCree.

 

“That is between Genji and I,” he said. Genji’s sword grip faltered. McCree blinked.

 

“I mean--” McCree looked unsure of his words. Genji tilted his head at the anomaly. “If you’re brave enough for it,” the cowboy mumbled, lifting his shoulders, cheeks red. “Suit yourself.” Another trail of smoke left his sunburnt lips. “He did already lead you to this dump,” he groused. “And Death’s own messenger.” He made a halfhearted flick at the nose of his hat even as it sat trapped against his chest.

 

“More like his shitty apprentice,” Genji said, earning a tick of those dull brown eyes. McCree soon passed over him to study Zenyatta’s tarnished faceplate, leaning his bearded jaw on his rawhide glove.

 

“You do seem to be holding up, considering.” He looked pointedly over the gory tripping hazards on the floor.

 

“Death is not unknown to me,” Zenyatta answered.

 

“You don’t say?” McCree flashed a broad, clumsy grin. “I might like you even more than I thought I did.” Zenyatta turned to Genji.

 

“We should leave.”

 

The cowboy sputtered.

 

“Alright now listen,” he blustered back in. “The boys are comin’, and you don’t want to meet them out there on foot.”

 

“Aren’t these your men?” Genji flicked his hand at the waves of corpses.

 

“Mine?” McCree laughed. He turned the rattle of Angela’s speech on mute, her shadow growing ever longer across the white stage. “You watch too much news. Why would I shoot my own?” His face fell as soon as he asked the question, but Genji did not sharpen any comebacks for him. The light in his visor ticked lower. “Anyway, the rest’ll be coming. Could use some help.” He looked at Genji, raised his elbow at Zenyatta. “Though, is that still your kinda thing?”

 

“It’s fine,” Genji said tersely.

 

“Good to know you’re not just decorative.”

 

The green light stung across McCree’s face, but the cowboy only smiled tiredly, no teeth.

 

“You needed help this whole time?” Genji demanded, synth throbbing weirdly in his throat. McCree breathed out slow, licked his lips, searching the floor before he spoke.

 

“I thought it would be okay like this.” Still smiling, he pulled at the side of his hair. “Just like this. But.” He narrowed his eyes. “Then you showed up and started pissin’ me off, so I’ll make you pay for safe passage.” He picked his hat off his heart and mushed it back over his head. Genji tracked the gleam of his newer edition arm.

 

“How did you do that?”

 

“Just made a mistake, as usual,” McCree dismissed. “It’s nothin’, darlin’.” He reached for the side of his stomach. “Though I have to warn ya I’m not sure if I can…” He groped at the hole in the side of his shirt. Bending over himself, he stretched the gap in the cloth to blink at the intact skin of his flank. “…get through the day without hallucinating?” he finished in a daze, poking the spot and twitching in ticklish reflex. “O-kay.” He sat back up, the two machines ogling him with their hard, inanimate faces.

 

McCree chewed on his lower lip. “So look, I’m thinkin’ there’s a couple lockers back here might do fine, if he folds his legs in.” He held out his hand at Zenyatta. The cyborg and omnic looked at each other.

 

“You are not putting him in a box,” Genji said.

 

“You serious? Deadlocks are nasty sons of bitches.” Genji’s visor blinked at the deepening of McCree’s voice, the rough edge. “There’ll be bullets.”

 

“I would be pleased to share Genji’s fate,” Zenyatta said.

 

“Ain’t that sweet.” McCree squeezed his eyes shut, aggravating the crow’s feet on the fringes.

 

“When are they coming?”

 

The cowboy leaned toward the bugscreen panel, sliding it out of the way to look out the window in the leviathan’s belly. Lodged in the iron bars not a meter away was an owl nest with a couple fat white chicks cowering in it, parents nowhere to be seen, a family interrupted by gunfire.

 

“Figure they won’t try at night. Sometime under the sun tomorrow.” He shrugged, slamming the screen closed.

 

“What about the police?”

 

“Probably waiting for some red tape to clear,” he scoffed. “That’s why I got out here first, else the scoundrels’d run off. Wouldn’t get the big man.” He toed his boot at one of the corpses. “That one.”

 

“But they think you are the boss, Jesse.”

 

“Yeah? So what. They aren’t gonna get me here. This is my goddamn land. My goddamn castle!” McCree’s bellows echoed off the Pegasus’s hollow guts.

 

“If we are waiting, we should make the best use of our time,” Zenyatta advised Genji.

 

“Sure, Zen.”

 

McCree eyed the two of them as they hunkered around the nearest body like a couple glistening vultures.

 

“What do you believe is appropriate?” Zenyatta asked.

 

“I don’t think we have time to cremate or bury them. We can put them outside so they do not smell so much, and when the police get here they can notify loved ones.” Genji fanned his hands under the arms of the man. Zenyatta nodded to him and took the knees.

 

“You don’t get it, bastards like that don’t have families,” McCree growled at their awkward procession toward the door. “Though I vote for you two tryin’ to make the biggest bonfire you can out of them regardless.” They ignored him.

 

McCree was still in the armchair when Genji returned alone later, though he had dragged it closer to the window so he could lean on the sill and look out. “Don’t go leavin’ guns on the ground,” he grunted as soon as Genji stepped through the doorway, without turning away from the window. “It’s a hazard.” His shoulders sank. “You are alive,” he rasped.

 

“The organization knew.” Genji approached the chair, staying just out of arms reach of the cowboy. “They sent a ship to the monastery.”

 

“Must’ve been after my time.” The gleam of McCree’s eye came over his shoulder at Genji. “Wasn’t gone too much longer after you.”

 

“You left?”

 

“Mmhm, after Ana kicked it.”

 

“Then she is dead.” Genji recalled the gray name on his file.

 

“Told ya I’m a messenger,” McCree groaned softly. “Sorry…we’re all sorry, about that one. But you’re still on this Earth, aren’t ya?” A little piece of his smile revealed over his black cloak. “That’s good. And you look good too. A lot better than back then.”

 

“Better than you.”

 

“Don’t be like that,” he complained, head drooping. “I’m sorry.”

 

“For what?”

 

“Don’t-- you know what.”

 

“A drunk man could be apologizing for anything.”

 

“I ain’t drunk. I’m in that good place.” McCree hiccupped. “The middle path.”

 

“Why are you here, Jesse?”

 

McCree looked back out across the desert, dry and orange in the sunset, the storybook shadow of the metal leviathan towering across the ocotillo and tumbleweeds.

 

“Unfinished business,” he muttered sourly. “Takin’ care of it.”

 

“Is something bothering you?”

 

Jesse McCree laughed, louder till it was near a howl. Genji’s feet shuffled disconcertedly on the grated floor, the owlets outside shrank against their nest.

 

“Nothing bothering me…” McCree dragged his hat down on his eyes. “Well, I might have a favor to ask of you.”

 

“What is it?”

 

“We can talk about it when we’re done with this mess, alright?”

 

“Do not fuck with me, Jesse.” He used his English, to make sure McCree understood. But McCree just grinned at him.

 

“I’m still registering most of your talk, actually. It’s a damn accomplishment. I haven’t been back to Japan in forever. But I hear you. I’m listenin’.”

 

* * *

 

Later, under moonlight, McCree hauled up to use the toilet and walked past the omnic monk floating cross-legged above one of the less bloody beds in the barracks. After he took care of business, he came back and pulled a couple fresh beer bottles from the fridge, then plopped down on a mattress across from Zenyatta. As he popped the cap off the first frosty glass, he noticed Genji curled up in an unused hammock behind the monk’s bed, visor dim, one of his hands dangling carelessly off the ropes.

 

He took a long sip, and cleaned the touches of brine off his lips with his tongue before he spoke.

 

“He sleeps?”

 

Zenyatta nodded. The omnic took up a prayer-like gesture in front of his chest, and McCree imagined he was meditating or something along those lines, but eventually Zenyatta spoke to him in the dark:

 

“You may rest also. I will wake you when the sun rises.”

 

“I gotta keep watch.” He shook his bottle at the other room with its screened window. “Just ‘cause I _think_ the boys won’t be stupid enough to go firing guns in the dark doesn’t mean they won’t get drunk and prove me wrong.” He took a swig. “What about you? Don’t Shambali believe dreaming is important? Got a whole tenant about it.”

 

“I would rather not enter to it passively. Tonight, I must be prepared to defend Genji if it is required of me.”

 

“Huh.” McCree smirked. “Wonder if he ever thinks of it that way.”

 

“Do you have any edible items in the refrigerator you have been retrieving alcohol from?”

 

“What, you mean like food?” McCree screwed his face up in thought. “Wasn’t lookin’ to be honest.”

 

“Genji has been upset. I thought he might enjoy breakfast tomorrow.”

 

“You know…” McCree studied the sleeping cyborg. “You’re a damn miracle.”

 

“Thank you.” Zenyatta’s voice flushed low. McCree thought it might be surprise. He leaned forward on his knees.

 

“So, the other monks ever let you off babysitting duty?” He rocked a bit in his seat. Zenyatta’s dirt-pocked face tilted at him.

 

“I am busy right now,” the monk said politely.

 

“Fair enough.” McCree drank more, instead. “You ain’t gonna ask me anything?”

 

“About Genji?” Zenyatta filled in perceptively. “He will tell me when he is ready.”

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

“I believe in him. He speaks to me often about his life, and what keeps him from dreaming. I do not fear a barrier between us, only what he holds within.”

 

“Yeah?” McCree looked down his bottle of spirits. “So what kinda wisdom you got for cleaning a soul?”

 

“You could stop murdering others,” the monk suggested.

 

“Probably. Though I hazard some people need killin’.” He tipped his head all the way back, extinguishing the bottle. He swung the empty glass between his knees. “I got in my head recently, this theory: that nobody ever really wins. It’s ‘cause no one knows when they are evil. We’re all trapped, goin’ through motions thinkin’ it’s for us, but it’s systemic. As long as we answer to somebody else, it’s got us tight. Some people might end up happy with that, but happiness ain’t everything. A pig with his slop bucket is happy. So a man’s gotta do as he will. There’s only one way out, and it’s yourself.”

 

“I agree.”

 

“Don’t believe I’ve had someone agree with me half as much as you ever.” McCree sighed luxuriously, and he flashed his most charming spread of teeth at the robot. “Kinda interested y’know. In finding more philosophies we agree on.”

 

“All relationships must contain both agreement and challenge, if they are to better their partners."

 

“Damn you’re feisty.” He got over to the other room for a glance at the window, and returned, closing on Genji’s hammock. “Still alive, not a ghost,” he recited in a throaty whisper, bottle hanging from one hand, reaching for the cat-ear spokes on the cyborg’s helmet with the other.

 

Zenyatta interceded with his entire body, and took McCree’s metal hand in his own. McCree stared dully at the connection, the warmth of it.

 

“Please do not touch Genji without his permission.”

 

“Yeah…” McCree blinked wax from his tear ducts, rubbing his forehead. He backed off to the red mattress where he had been sitting. The piled guns around the pillows jingled. He leaned back. “Just gonna rest my eyes for a few.”

 

* * *

 

High noon.

 

Four armored cars escaped the infinity of the blue horizon and jetted toward the graveyard beneath the Pegasus’s wings. Genji watched them from atop one of the automaton’s slack cannons, his audio feed inactive, unable to hear the pep rally hollers of the car occupants as they waved guns out the windows. To him their travel was narrated by acoustic folk, a woman weeping beside her guitar, the last thing Jesse had left active on the music app the previous day. He and Zenyatta relaxed out of their mirrored meditations, dimmed the audio connection, and reactivated their external sensors.

 

“Do you think he is awake yet?” Genji asked.

 

“We should attempt to rouse him again, if that is not the case.”

 

The cars leaped over a hill of gravel, close enough for Genji to see the hover jets cycling blue in their wheel wells. An omnic’s white head glowed past one of the windshields, skeletal fingers cutting into the faux leather on the wheel as he leaned forward and stared straight back at Genji. Rifle pops from the passenger windows reflected off the Pegasus’s rusted skin as Genji followed Zenyatta through a maintenance hatch back inside.

 

They returned to the dead giant’s interior, and McCree lay stretched across the armchair again, a yolk in his glass and his eyes on the window.

 

“Hey, they had some eggs in there,” he rambled at Zenyatta, flapping his hand at the refrigerator. Genji crossed his arms at this re-introduction, no clearer for its relative sobriety.

 

“Yes. Unfortunately, they are not appropriate.”

 

“What, you don’t like eggs now?” McCree complained at Genji.

 

“Jesse, the Deadlocks.”

 

“Yeah.” He gurgled down his salty looking drink. “Engines woke me.” Genji could feel the diesel imitative vibrato through the floor, up through his legs. “Got a good angle on ‘em from here.” McCree lifted his ragged chin at the window. A blackened owl had arrived to cover up the chicks, and stared in at them with glass eyes. One chick poked its head from beneath a dappled wing, the tail of an infant snake curling out of its beak. McCree lined out his Peacekeeper and cigar box on the windowsill next to the curious owlet. It shrank back out to safety when McCree lit a cigar. He settled the Peacekeeper on top of his own metal arm, looking down the barrel as the cars swarmed toward the bowed knees of the Pegasus.

 

“Patience,” Zenyatta suggested. McCree thumbed the cigar out of his mouth, looking slowly over his shoulder at the two of them. He exhaled scentless smoke, his pupils small and hard and locked on the monk. Genji ducked his visor, rocking his weight between the robot and man, but as soon as he started to move McCree returned to the window vista.

 

“You’re right,” he said. “I see Charleston hooked ‘em up with some shielding elements on the hoods. Would’ve wasted my shot.”

 

“Charleston?”

 

“There’s an omnic with them, painted himself up like a bone. He’s knowledgeable, and not the least bit drunk.” McCree leveled the revolver properly as the car doors winged open. The white omnic got out, but immediately circled around the back of his car and popped the trunk, blocking further view. McCree clucked his tongue. “You two turn down your audio for a sec.”

 

Genji muted his reception, but McCree held his bullets. He could see the cowboy muttering, lips coiling in the window shadow: _come out you bastard._ Baring his teeth, he hunched his shoulders, leaned into the frame, and fired. The black owl swept off, disappearing into the glare of the sunlight, leaving its chicks to cower and wet themselves in the nest thicket. Genji detected the gun scream even through his dimmed hearing, but he could not pick out the individual rounds passing the barrel. His visor feed told him six of the men on the ground were dead, the others just out of the funeral portrait frame, or behind cover.

 

Like Charleston. The white omnic’s head poked out from the side of the trunk, searching the corpses on the ground, then aiming straight for the window as McCree started frantically reloading his Peacekeeper. Empty shells pinged and rolled on the floor under the armchair as Genji tuned his hearing.

 

Charleston stepped out, fully in view, naked outside of his ordinance belt and holster, and the ebony ten-gallon on his head. He had a freshly assembled rocket launcher primed on his shoulder, and steadied his hand to the side of it, half-obscuring its _ISAIAH_ designation. McCree shouted his way up from the armchair and grabbed Genji and Zenyatta’s shoulders, pushing them at the next room. Genji folded his arm around Zenyatta’s back as the cowboy corralled them into the staircase.

 

The living quarters exploded.

 

Boiling air, smoke, and colorful postcards smeared the three of them against the steps. McCree was blown clear over Genji; Genji felt a metal boot toe clunk the back of his helmet. He heard McCree coughing uncontrolled, choking. White gas slopped back out of the Pegasus’s newest wound. He stretched his feet toward the lower stair and felt air. Outside one of the car engines restarted. Genji tugged on Zenyatta, making sure he was not in danger of falling, but Zenyatta put a firm grip over his shoulder, nodding to him as soon as they could see each other. McCree stopped making noise and lay in a tight disaster at the top of the steps.

 

A gold sphere floated up to the pile of crunched bone and exposed meat. Even after, when he looked whole, McCree did not respond to Genji’s hand shaking his shoulder.

 

“Jesse.” Genji brightened his visor in the man’s face. McCree looked into the light, then nodded wearily and rolled over onto his hands and knees. He led a creaky path to the top of the stairs and tumbled out the door, followed by his guests.

 

A bell-like _tick_ winked through the air, a couple pale headlights scouring up the metal ramp. McCree shambled toward the white glare, but Genji pulled him back. The car at the base of the ramp was full of grinning, black-toothed faces.

 

“Hi McCree!” one of the passengers crooned. The driver revved the engine.

 

McCree tipped around on his heels toward the doorway at the other end of the corridor. Genji pushed him and he started running. Zenyatta drifted alongside the man, as fast as he could, but on the third engine bellow the car shot up the ramp, the sitting Bastion shoved out of its path aside from an arm that stuck to the grill. Bloody walls and car doors whooped up a banshee as the Deadlocks charged the doorway.

 

The hollering turned anxious as the car neared the impassable wall, but the driver was laughing. Genji caught Zenyatta from behind, and kneed McCree in the ass to spur him the last few steps to safety. He lifted his leg and there was a bumper under his foot when he brought it down. With Zenyatta wreathed against his chest, Genji kicked through the door. A ravenous _thud_ crushed the engine compartment into the doorframe, bowing the frame out and compacting the hood to a quarter size.

 

“Thank you, my friend,” Zenyatta said over the hissing steam and cursing car occupants. Genji helped him up. McCree walked back over to the door, one of the grenades from the stockpile he had slept on in his hand. He tossed it onto the car, landing it between the raised wrinkles of the hood and the reflexively active windshield wipers. He waved his metal hand at the Deadlocks as they stared at the small gray casing, then his silhouette lit up black as the hallway in front of him filled with flame.

 

“Assholes.” McCree spit into the fiery wreckage. He turned toward the omnic and cyborg, his face powdered black. “See, easy! I had this handled.” He sniffed, swallowed, then bent over and centered his elbows on his knees. “It’s okay,” he continued wetly, swallowing again. “I just can’t hear anything right this moment. Is Charl- Charlie? Was he in the car?” Genji shook his head. “Damnit. C’mon, I think there’s another way out…this way.”

 

McCree dug a finger at his ear as they traversed the smoky hallways. They entered the Pegasus’s mortality: sunlight fluttered between spikes of broken steel, the wiring and walls punched in, following the velocity of a lodged, rocket-powered shell. Dry shadows of coolant stained every surface. A couple Deadlocks awaited them around a corner, but McCree caught both in a casual flicker of fire and bullets from his Peacekeeper. The gun obscured the sound, though not the vibration, of a body dropping from a maintenance vent and landing between Genji and Zenyatta.

 

The matte white omnic rose through the patchwork sunlight, arms and legs like simple bones out from his armored torso, minimal exposed wiring, a triple bar of signal lights flushing red from his face. The cutting line of his jaw flexed open by a token centimeter, writing a darker line of his mouth as he drew a gun. Zenyatta drifted backwards, stretching straighter, orbs making a static circle around his body.

 

Charleston remained still until McCree cracked his sixshooter, until Genji loosed the shuriken from his hand. Then he lunged from both attacks, and Zenyatta reached out with both palms. A white flash crackled between the omnics and Charleston bellowed, but turned around just as fast to the two men with one arm trapping Zenyatta’s limbs against his chassis, and his handgun against the monk’s temple.

 

The Deadlock’s head dripped, casing severed by the one correct hit, jaw dangling agape against Zenyatta’s shoulder. His chest glittered with some type of raw opening as well. Despite this, his voice flowed out calm, velvet steel:

 

“Do not move.”

 

The final pair of human bandits wormed out of the access and collapsed to the floor.

 

“Jesus Charlie!” one of them coughed as he pulled out a stubby machine gun. The other just spit and cursed. Both of them had active, sober eyes, assessing the situation and getting to their feet, pointing their guns at McCree since he still had his revolver up.

 

“Drop your weapons,” Charleston continued softly.

 

“Like hell,” McCree thundered, and blinked aside as he noticed movement by Genji. The cyborg descended to his knees, taking the sword scabbards from his back and laying both across the grating in front of him. “Stop!” he squawked, looking from Genji back to the bandits. “He’s just going to kill all of us!” Charleston’s array of indicators pulsed gently at Genji, pleased, almost pink.

 

“Do as he says,” Genji instructed, hands resting over the tops of his thighs. A shudder came into McCree’s lungs.

 

“He hack you?” he bleated at Genji. “C’mon, darlin’--” When Genji did not move, McCree hissed his breath in and leaned the Peacekeeper at Charleston’s head, the omnic lifting his ruby-lit faceplate at the barrel. “No way. No way I’m ever gettin’ on my knees for these punks. They’re gonna kill your friend. Where is your anger, Genji?!”

 

Time passes only on the exhale, Genji thought. His artificial lungs barely moved. He raised his visor to Zenyatta, spoke to McCree:

 

“Trust me.”

 

McCree’s eyes drilled against the back of his head, following the line of his ribbon to where it coiled against his feet, the fabric swaying on the wind that came pouring between the automaton’s shattered bones. “Abandon your weapon and kneel," Genji said. Charleston’s head tilted back toward him. “It will hurt otherwise.”

 

“I understand,” Zenyatta agreed, blue lights twinkling beside the gun barrel. “I am ready.”

 

“You’ve all gone crazy,” McCree cried. “This is a dream.” Genji heard the metal whimper of the cowboy’s Peacekeeper being set to the floor.

 

“Thanks,” Charleston said, and squeezed the trigger.

 

The bullets were not permitted.

 

In the heat of the afternoon, the Pegasus sighed as its heart lit up gold long after the last drumbeats of the Crisis. The frame swayed, destabilized, burning, broken wings shedding from its back and falling down its flanks. Iron plasmetal bars the length of jetliners fell black past the shredded hallway. A shadow wrapped in gold turned his glittering head toward Charleston. Many arms plunged through the white omnic’s body, reached out in the air, turned and distorted. Charleston still had a grip on Zenyatta’s torso, but he could not pull anything off, and it did not matter how many times he clicked his gun.

 

For all the light around him, the Deadlock could not see. A stream of neon green in the sunlight, the blooming of two red roses in the grass, he turned the gun out at the ghost appearing in front of him. This time the bullets hit-- like raindrops, stippling and fading on the white armor. Small blades cut apart the remains of his head case. Of all the anachronistic dream weapons, a short sword plunged into his abdominal column and raked upward. It did not even hurt. His lights were out before he understood anything but the light holding onto him as much as he had feebly tried to restrain it.

 

“Holy hell!” McCree shouted overloud as the radiance faded, rocking on the floor next to his unmoved, placid revolver. He chanced an eye up and grabbed his gun, aiming at each of the corpses on the ground, then at the two ash-riddled machines standing a little ways away.

 

“You are very calm,” Zenyatta said, touching the cheek of Genji’s faceplate. “Never angry.” The cyborg panted, blood in many colors gobbed across his chest and arms. His katana rested on the floor midway between their pairing and McCree. His wakizashi still had its tip stuck in Charleston’s neck, where the carving line ended. “How wonderful.”

 

“Did…Genji did you see…?” McCree holstered his gun, and capped his hand against his hip, rubbing the other over his sweaty brow. He could hear just fine: the whistling of the wind that cleansed the hallways of smoke, even for a second he thought he caught the servomotor as Genji’s head turned his way. The cyborg was the only thing still glowing, neon down all his lights. He leaned at McCree.

 

“Yo, Jesse!” Like something hungry.

 

“Uh-huh. O-kay.” McCree waved a few fingers at the blood-covered ninja.

 

“There is more work to do,” Zenyatta said, looking down at the corpses. “But I believe we will eventually have time to stop and reflect.”

 

“You sound like Mondatta,” Genji teased him. He looked again for Jesse after inspecting the omnic for wounds, but the cowboy was lumbering down a pile of rubble to escape outside.

 

After they added Charleston and the rest of the cavalry to the broken line, Genji hunted around the nursing shadows of the Pegasus and found McCree under one of the legs. His mouth looked unbearably empty, the cigar box not precious enough to save from rocket fire, and he had already gone through all the whiskey. Owl feathers rolled past the long, lazy flop of the cowboy’s legs. Genji sat next to him in the cool sand, two fingers under his chin.

 

“Don’t know what kind of serendipity you have about you,” McCree said.

 

“What does that mean?”

 

“It’s a species of luck.”

 

Genji leveled his visor on the gray and yellow brush of the open desert, marked the spot where the pallid blue of the sky blurred into the land, and breathed out.

 

“I am just looking for Angela.”

 

McCree’s hat turned at him a bit, but Genji could not see his eyes.

 

“So, she’s alright. You still going?”

 

“She looked strange… I want to be sure.”

 

“You know, people change.” McCree raised his head, looking through a hole in the automaton chassis that led his eye straight to the sun. Genji watched the rough, dirty lines of his cheeks reveal in the light. There was no gray in his beard yet, but it was lighter than Genji remembered. Chestnut, like a horse. “My request concerns her, if you still want to take it with you.”

 

“You sound angry.”

 

“I’m just fine.” McCree flattened his lips together, holding them, ruminating over his words before he let them free. “What I want is for her to turn over Reyes’s body to me, please.” He spat the courtesy. “His family’s been waiting so long for a funeral I think they’re starting to look forward to it.”

 

“Why would Angela have it?”

 

“She’s got a history. The dead go missing and she’s around, they ain’t really missing.”

 

Genji wondered if he was missing some nuance of English.

 

“You think Mr. Reyes is still alive?”

 

McCree dusted his fingers under his hat, trying to tug out the sweat drops by hand. Pulling the oily ends of his hair to further disarray.

 

“Nah. They ID’d the body, _then_ it went missing. Anyway, I want it back.”

 

“For his family.” Genji was trying to piece together in his mind Gabriel Reyes, Man With Family. He was not prepared for the cowboy’s snarl and knotted brow.

 

“Yes. The one who’s left alive gets to play undertaker. Jesus, the fuck is your problem Genji?”

 

Genji glowed surprise, shoulders rising as he leaned away from McCree. The gesture was more illustrative than reflex. McCree grunted acknowledgment, settling the creases that threatened to become wrinkles across his beaten mug. He held his palm up, inviting the cyborg back to the conversation.

 

“It is probably just ‘red tape’,” Genji offered, slowly drawing his center of weight back over his legs. “I will ask her. Where should she…mail it?”

 

“Fuck you.” McCree’s cursing sounded substantially less energetic this time. He sagged on the ground, silent. Only when Genji entered his peripheral view, peeking at his face, did he dig his phone out and toss it on the sand between them. The screen had cracked in three different starbursts. “Take my info off the phone. Send me a message and I’ll arrange the pick-up.”

 

Genji took the phone in his hand, cocking his head at the lock screen: a black and white photo of two wild horses fighting.

 

“I can’t connect with the Net by myself. Just--” He drew a circle over the sand around his body. “--proximity. Do you want Zenyatta to contact you?”

 

McCree exhaled a low curse. He plucked his Peacekeeper from the holster, and Genji straightened to attention.

 

“Sorry. Got somethin’ that could help.” McCree pried open a secret panel on the barrel, dumping out a circular disc no bigger than the tip of his pinkie. Genji could see a second device embedded in the Peacekeeper’s shell. McCree held out the spare, but when Genji reached his hand, he pulled it back. “It’s got a cost.”

 

Genji fluttered his lights, waiting. “Uhm, back when Ana bought it…” McCree sounded like a child trying to explain why all the cookies went missing from the jar. “There were some other things going on. Gabe didn’t notice, I don’t-- I’m not sure why. He didn’t notice me at all.” He swiped at his hair, and his hand lingered, dragging on the ends. “Winston sure did though,” he added fondly, lifting his eyebrows at Genji. “Pulled me aside a few days before I even decided on leavin’. Gave me the disc, told me if it was important, like world-important, he would give me a ring.”

 

McCree shook his head. “Guess even he didn’t see what was coming. I’m sure he would’ve sent somethin’ otherwise. And I would’ve seen that and I would have come running. Gotten Gabe out, maybe whether he liked it or not.” He was grinning, rocking his weight. He sniffed. “It’s got a Net link. If you register on it Winston will know you’re okay, where ya are, and he might give you a call someday.”

 

“You think he is alive?”

 

“A corpse like that would be pretty distinct, is what I think. So that’s the deal.”

 

“Winston…” Genji held out his hand. “I don’t mind.” McCree dropped the disc into his palm. “Why do you have two of them?”

 

“Oh, I asked for the second one. Doesn’t matter now though.”

 

Genji scrutinized the device, then opened the shuriken compartment on his right arm. McCree frowned, watching him lodge it in a safe compartment beside the reload mechanism, away from the moving parts. A few nanofibers from his endoskeleton wrapped over it and registered him.

 

He searched for the hospital announcement stream and watched Angela all over again. There was no other video or article about her between the Geneva incident and the public address, aside from a press release for the new hospital.

 

_Loch4n4: Genji?_

He felt the question, clearer than the video of Angela. Obscuring her.

 

_Aakhaa: It is Genji!_

_Loch4n4: Genji it is so nice to see you!_

_m.o.n: I am pleased to speak with you directly again. Welcome home._

The rest of the Shambali flooded in. He must have been shuddering with relief; McCree asked if he was alright.

 

“My friends found me,” he replied faintly. Jesse smiled at him, his eyes bright. Genji cradled the weapon in his right arm, the resting place of his connection.

 

“You could always ignore Winston when he calls, a-course,” the cowboy suggested. Genji looked at him. “If you got someplace you’d rather be.”

 

Genji shook his head lightly, studying the dirt. He picked up a tuft of gray down.

 

“You got those owls killed.”

 

“Yep. Sorry.”

 

“It is…bad luck, probably.”

 

“Yeah? Since when do you care about omens?” Genji turned the feather between his fingers, unable to really detect it by touch, like it was a hallucination he manipulated in his hand. “I am sorry, Genji,” McCree was saying, and when he did not look up from the feather the man shoved his shoulder. “I’m tryin’ to apologize here.” Genji looked at the hand touching him, which pulled back.

 

He abandoned the feather to the desert, and watched McCree take a deep breath. “I fucked up a lot, and I started to lose my eyes for things other than killing. But I shouldn’t’ve lied to you, or shot you. The organization was a lot of good for a lot of people, but I should have understood they weren’t treatin’ you to be part of the family.” He blinked, shaking his head. “I swear, I don’t know why. You’re just-- they brought you back to life but treated you like you were dead. I never wanted you to die. But I participated anyway. So I am sorry.”

 

McCree switched briefly over to Japanese, to pace out a formal apology phrase. His pronunciation was still skillful; Genji imagined he had used that particular line a lot. “And if you want to put it all on me, if I’m the only one you want to hate, you can go ahead.”

 

Genji did not say anything. McCree hung his head. He repeated his Japanese breathily, and looked up sharp when the cyborg’s synth finally stirred.

 

“I am trying to be angry. It is just that hatred takes a lot of effort,” Genji said. He reached over and picked off the remains of the black cowl over McCree’s shoulders, dropping the cloth scraps on the ground. Jesse smiled wryly at him.

 

A siren wail commanded both their heads up at the distant sky. “More bandits?”

 

McCree grimaced.

 

“Worse, the Feds. Damn Charlie blew up all my ammo too. Go on and get your boss. I can’t fend them off you if they find you.” He tipped his hat. “I’ll buy you some time.”

 

“How will you escape?”

 

“Feelin’ like a brand new man. Can handle a few blues.” McCree got up and headed for the Pegasus’s belly. “Don’t you worry.”

 

Genji ran across the shallow plants of the desert, scoured for Zenyatta around the burial line where he had left him. He found the monk only when he examined the corpses more carefully, the omnic leaned into a space between two of them. No mudras, lights dim.

 

“Yo!” He jogged over, tapping the crown of Zenyatta’s head. The lights brightened and Zenyatta looked up. “This is not a good place to nap,” Genji chided. He squatted down to look more face-to-face with the monk. “Are you still tired?”

 

“I am still thinking. About your brother.”

 

Genji’s back seized, muscles he did not have clenching against his spine as he looked away from his teacher.

 

“Jesse says the police are coming.”

 

“And so, we should run away?” Zenyatta guessed. Genji pulled him onto the air, holding his hands till he was sure the omnic would stay up. Zenyatta floated effortlessly as ever.

 

“Let’s see if we can find water again, wash up before we call the ship. I do not want to get yelled at by the guards.” Genji studied his own dusty reflection on Zenyatta’s black-patched face. Zenyatta looked down, pinching the torn fabric of his burnt pantlegs.

 

“I do not want to be yelled at either,” the monk squeaked in sudden realization. They snuck out from the shadow of the wreckage and crouch-walked through the brush. Police airships and cars stormed in around the Pegasus.

 

“You’ll never take me alive, you sons of bitches!” they heard McCree bellow from within the fortress.

 

“Is he going to be alright?” Zenyatta asked, looking over his shoulder.

 

“He said he could handle it,” Genji mumbled, stepping gingerly over a cactus.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : Heroes never die! ...for a price.
>   * _mesa_ : tableland/table hill, an elevated area with a flat top
>   * _arroyo_ : a dry creek bed, becomes a stream in the rain 
>   * _ocotillo_ : A [really baller plant](http://www.desertusa.com/flora/photos/oco1384.jpg) native to the southwestern US and Mexico. In gardens you may see them as single plants, but in the wild they can grow in large groups.
>   * After 3 weeks of not being able to write due to work-related travel and such, I was able to finish this chapter. Sorry for the delay.
> 



	13. Kill Code

 

_Go east, and you will find it_

_This is a better world_

_The waters of paradise_

_This is a better world_

_The soul of creation that comes from men_

“This is a better world.” Angela stepped back from the podium, sun playing a halo off her cropped white jacket. The omnic beside her, robin’s egg blue, face overcome by a medical cross, tucked his spidery arm across her shoulders. In ceremonial tandem, they raised their right hands to the shining building behind them. Upon its silver face, a snake churned about a staff, body equal parts flesh and branching wire diagram.

 

Genji rewound the footage till Angela was in the center of the frame again, her hands braced on the podium’s sandalwood outcrops.

 

“This is a better world.” Moisture glittered in the corner of her left eye. When she lifted her head, the shadows beneath her cheekbones dissipated. The bodies of the crowd swayed beneath her, entranced. He rewound.

 

“This is a better world.”

 

Genji stretched his legs across the mattress pin-straight, feet slightly vibrating. When his heels clunked gracelessly to the bedsheets, needles flowed out of his ankles, and his frame warmed and twitched around him. His visor feed returned, casting the open window beside the bed.

 

A skyscraper-sized hologram glared through the bug screen at him, bloodied by pink water and sunrise, palm trees marching silhouette and flying drones brandishing chunks of human history in their clamps. Text filled the image in Arabic and English. The holo read:

 

_Go east, and you will find it_

_The waters of paradise_

_The soul of creation that comes from men_

_OASIS_

The word _soul_ glowed in the eye of a mechanical flower at the holographic water’s edge. A direction box at the bottom held omnic code for people to scan into the processors of their flying cars, a heading across the atmospheric highway. Genji rolled onto his back. _OASIS_ smeared a dull afterimage on the ceiling.

 

The entire Net lay open to him.

 

He opened the same porn site he had used when he lived in Hanamura.

 

Most popular videos: close-ups of asses with blurs in them where the camera had not fully ingested the movement, women’s faces covered in jelly-like cum while veiny penises hung over their eyes, women bent forward with breasts hanging, their partners’ body parts jutting from off-frame. Genji switched tabs to _FREE LIVE CAMS_ and scrolled around, selecting the thumbnail of a girl with a couple athletics trophies on her dresser, foundation plaques turned away to obscure her name. The shadow of a rotating fan fluttered across her naked body. Glow-in-the-dark fighting fish orbited each other in the corner, holograms in a waterless bubble aquarium.

 

The streamer looped her arms over her head, reclining on a steppe of pillows. Muscle etched her shoulders-- gymnastics, he thought, or swimming. A long dakimakura with an anime print flanked her hip. Genji could only see a couple of the character’s fingers, and the tail-end of the actor’s signature writ gold across the fabric. He opened additional tabs in the _M / M_ site section just in case, but settled for watching the streamer play with the fire-dyed tips of her hair.

 

She stretched, lifting her ribs off the mattress, and glanced at the tablet propped by her bedside. Curls of red tipped the corners of her eyelids, making every look a theatric exaggeration. Viewer chyrons flowed over the bottom of the video, and especially large donations crossed the center, along her belly or legs.

 

“ _What do you want to see next?”_ she asked, and with a key of her tablet switched her chat to subscribers-only. She sat up and streamed her hair over her shoulder while the votes tallied, stroking downward in a fluid sequence with both hands. She released the subscriber hold on the chat and displayed the poll results in an overlay.

 

_Guest2743: Cute._

One of hundreds of messages, but by luck it grew large in the chyron, and the streamer grinned and raised her hands in a cat claw pose. Then she motioned her camera drone closer to her legs.

 

“ _It looks like we are going traditional!_ ” She pushed a tray of toys off-camera, and opened her thighs. She started to lean back, but quirked up to check the chat on her tablet again. “ _I like it,_ ” she replied to someone. Brushing her hair out fiery across the pillows, she resettled her butt on the mattress a couple times. “ _It’s a journey._ ” She guided her hand to the opening of her vagina. Genji deactivated his external audio feed.

 

He reached under the end of his abdominal plate, scraped at the dark gray panel. His eyelids squeezed shut, though it did not interfere with his view of the stream or the picture-in-picture of _OASIS_ and the empty hotel room. Chest pushing out, hand unsteady, he grasped at the air above the armor patch. A faint memory, a small weight against his palm. The only word he could think for it now was _fragile._

 

The streamer pulled her middle finger out from the folding at the bottom of her vulva, skin suctioning off and puffing up. She sketched the top of her slit with the wet carried on her fingertip. “ _It’s getting to know myself,_ ” she joked, and the drone floated lower to the mattress for a more dramatic angle. Her breasts rose against a soft yellow backlight, nipples erecting pink-brown as she breathed. Genji heaved onto his side, fist shut on the hopeless imaginary. His hand spread into claws against his crotch. “Fuck,” he mumbled.

 

Fire girl’s leg twitched up at the knee when she separated the lips of her vulva, showing her blazing pink innards to the drone. She obscured the entrance with her finger, sparkling emerald nail and first and second joints disappearing inside. Genji concentrated enough pressure to coax a few pulses through his damage detection. Choking his synthesizer, he kept scrabbling at the armor and surrounding red-gray muscle padding. The motion slowed until it stopped, just an occasional jerk of fingertips between long minutes.

 

The streamer startled him a while later with soft, sob-like noises as she hopped her hips into the air. He stared at the back of her hand, tendons relaxing as her fingers slid off her clitoris and bathed in the folds underneath. A casual dip or two into the opening precluded nothing, just appreciation for her twitching apparatus. After a couple minutes fanned across her fluffy cushions, she looked at the drone and waved her hand, mouthing _Thank you for your love!_ The feed went dark, and the site started loading the next girl in the list.

 

Genji shut it off. He rolled over onto his belly and embedded his faceplate in the pillows. A mechanical snarl into the fluff, then he collapsed all possibility of movement from his prosthetic.

 

When he came to life again, it was to pull out all the cushions from under his head. He seized the heaviest in his arms and held it to his torso.

 

_karroten: Did you ever come back from your walk?_

_Z_E_N: I did. I am on the roof. There is a meteor shower tonight. Would you like to join me?_

Genji hugged the pillow, kneading the nose of his helmet at the top of it.

 

_karroten: No. I was just seeing if you were okay._

_Z_E_N: An owl is weeping with open wings / from its roost behind the cremation ground / another adds his song in fragments / “in what soil grows the lotus now?”_

He laughed at himself, visor dying to a lime simmer as his body relaxed from the cushion weight. It was the choking laugh of salve on a burn, laughter at a child that could be nourished to sleep by simple stories.

_karroten: I guess there was no reason for me to doubt._

_Z_E_N: What did you think of?_

_karroten: Teeth to the toothless / claws to the weak / bones to the maimed / limbs to the crippled / fingers to duty and roads to my legs_

Genji stuck out his arm till it looked like his hand held the light of _OASIS_ , but the advertisement darkened. Its faded remnant shimmered pearly across his tangle of metal plates and bedsheets. Planes and flying cruise ships scrawled red through the dim hologram, reverse meteors falling to heaven.

 

_karroten: Maybe we will find Angela tomorrow._

 

* * *

 

Little birds quarreled for breeding rights across the canopies of irrigated acacias. Genji leaned into his reflection along gate bars etched with flowers and vines. His shadow stretched and strained across the off-white concrete of a private road. Beside the gate, a switchbox activated the red dot of inquiry.

 

“Angela,” he chirped. Zenyatta floated along his side closer to the gate, inspecting the engravings on the bars. Genji dragged his fist on the metal.

 

“Who is it?” the switchbox answered. Not Angela’s voice. Genji crossed his arms as he stared down the twenty-centimeter-long device, _Security provided by the Vishkar Corporation_ inscribed along its bottom edge.

 

“Genji!” he declared. Past the gate and the white hoop driveway, the front door of the granite house spilled security guards in sunglasses and black caps across the residence’s twinkling lawn. Their mouths moved rapidly to their headsets, long guns balanced in their hands. Genji bent closer to the switchbox to ensure it could hear: “I am Angela’s friend. I have been looking for her for a while. She did not put her information in the directory, but I was told she may live in this area. Is this her house?” He stepped back to appraise the mansion beyond the bars. “It is a nice house!”

 

Silence. The red light remained on. Zenyatta tapped Genji’s shoulder as he switched sides and got closer to the speaker.

 

“May we speak with Angela Ziegler?” he asked. “It would be acceptable just through this device.”

 

“But--” Genji ended his protest when Zenyatta raised his hand, cautioning him to patience.

 

Sirens went off on car tops kilometers away. No one answered Zenyatta, and over the awkward minutes of showdown with the eyeless guards, the sirens went from filtered annoyances to acute banshee wails. Green and white patterned cars arrowed out of the treeline to circle the two wanderers at the gate. Birds scattered in all directions.

 

Police sprang from air-conditioned interiors, shouting in Arabic, guns out of holsters. Genji raised his arms over his head, like in the movies. “Do as I do,” Zenyatta said, voice firm above the ruckus. Genji looked, and the monk was lowering his feet and knees to the pavement, laying his orbs in a line. Kneeling to men that cocked handguns at him for his compliance.

 

Genji shut his eyes as he followed Zenyatta’s instructions, knees crunching into the asphalt. He crossed his fingers behind his head. They ripped the swords from his back with fizzing snaps of the nanomagnetic tethers. Standing around him, one officer gripped his shoulder, another his hands. They spread him out on the ground, and he activated his visor while they felt around the seams of his armor. He watched Zenyatta. Three of the men pressed in around the monk.

 

Zenyatta turned his head to meet Genji’s gaze between an officer’s beige pantlegs. “Stay calm.” At the moment the Japanese came out of him, the officer kicked Zenyatta in what would have been ribs. Zenyatta fell onto his side. The officer shook his boot, complaining to the others, and got laughed at.

 

Genji tried following his teacher’s advice. An officer tipped his boot to the inside of a thigh, lifting up. What was he looking for? But when Genji turned his head, another hand crushed it to the ground. Had he scratched himself the night before? The police talked to each other, and the word _omnic_ stuck out. They sounded confused. Genji flushed behind his mask. Zenyatta’s warning, and the sound of the kick that followed, kept looping in his audio. Tremors moved up his wrists into his fingers as he was handcuffed.

 

They took him off the ground, a hand flattened on the back of his helmet as he was marched to one of the cars. He was locked in the back on a cloth seat. Slits in the sides poured cool air over him. An air freshener shaped like a white bird dangled on the other side of a grate between the front and back sections.

 

Zenyatta was taken to a different car. Genji followed the chrome glint of his head. He leaned up to the side of the car, panting as he tried to move his hands apart and the cuffs held. The officer that hopped in the driver’s seat looked back at him with blue star eyes leering from an elongate tactical mask, and Genji understood why his body had tightened stone-like beneath him.

 

_karroten: It is happening again._

_Z_E_N: I am right here._

 

Organs floated into his chest, gelled blue liquid filled his throat. His right arm cracked along the seam where it met his shoulder, his jaw dissected away from its hinges.

 

_Z_E_N: Remember how we meditate, my friend._

 

The officer had blue-tinted sunglasses. Genji stared at them as he fell on his side. He watched the white bird jingle beyond the bars as the man began driving. His body jerked along its spine, a peculiar landed fish. The other officer, in the passenger seat, asked him a question through the grate.

 

Genji did not resist the shaking of his body, did not put effort to answering the Arabic, but drew in the sound, focused on the peak in environmental detail. Wrestling control of his audio, he considered his flesh: mechanical as it had always been, full of wiring instead of blood. He was no longer waiting to die, but waiting for wreckage to pass through his sensory framework. He floated on the sea instead of drowning in it.

 

When the car stopped, the officer on the passenger side opened the door where he lay quietly and bent over him. The man touched his spine in a few places, and then cupped the side of his head to point his eyeframe up. He asked questions again. Genji ticked a few fingers out from where his hands were trapped together, to show he was alive. He glanced at the face beneath the sunglasses, checking that the kind officer was actually human.

 

He and Zenyatta reunited in a hospital white jail cell. Zenyatta drifted out of the corner to embrace him. Genji chuckled.

 

“That was inconvenient huh?” His synth played at teasing, but the tone was coughed out, shriveled. He stepped out of Zenyatta’s arms and sat on one of the slab cots sticking from the wall. Hung his head, and concentrated on his breathing. “At least, we did not have to fight anyone.”

 

“Through humility, we avoided a violent resolution. But I wonder at the cost.” Zenyatta floated down next to him.

 

“It is not something I get to choose,” Genji sighed, though his synth still tried to sound playful. He cupped his hands against his faceplate and rubbed back along the sides of his helmet. “They did not ask me anything.” Zenyatta’s signal array swelled white-blue. “You know something?”

 

“We were brought here due to some form of trespassing. I told them that to speak with you in your native language, they would require a translator, so they have gone to retrieve an omnic liaison.”

 

“Surely one of them speaks English?” Genji wondered. Zenyatta looked away at the very interesting wall across the cell.

 

“I only told them that to speak in your native language, a translator was required,” he said in a very low and soft voice.

 

“Oh no!” Genji snickered. “Am I influencing you?”

 

“I was once caught and interrogated as to who kept striking the bells around the shrine whenever you and I went to visit. My sister who asked thought I might have seen the culprit, and I said ‘no I do not see him clearly,’ which was accurate because you were not in the area at the time of the questioning, and I could not detect my own clear reflection on her face. She was dirty from working in the-- Genji?”

 

Genji ducked his face against Zenyatta’s flowering silver collarbone stems. He squeezed the back of his teacher’s resilient chassis.

 

“So you belong in here,” he breathed out against the metal. Zenyatta laughed, and the chimes were all around Genji. “I guess we got the wrong house. But these police are nothing like the ones in Hanamura.”

 

“How do you mean?”

 

“When Father invited the commissioners over for dinner, they always brought the best gifts. And if I was drunk and trashing something, the officers would give me a ride home.” He cupped his hand around the boot print embedded on the side of Zenyatta’s abdominal trunk. “Do you think they figured out we helped Jesse? Maybe we are international wanted fugitives too.”

 

“I do not know.”

 

Genji tried tapping the news feeds regarding Jesse McCree, but received a feedback buzz from the jail’s cybersecurity: _NET ACCESS IN THIS AREA PROHIBITED._

“At least we can tell our grandchildren about the time we went to jail,” he snorted, slumping on the wall. Zenyatta followed his movement with sharp adjustments of his neck.

 

“Do you have a child?” he asked.

 

“It was a joke.”

 

The world beyond their cell did not stir again till the slot windows in the corridor faded olive eye black. It was almost time to dream.

 

Ceramic seashell clicks prowled the hall toward them, a steady heartbeat of little bones knocking together-- lady’s dress heels. Genji lifted his head from the hard pallet.

 

Angela stepped in front of the thin blue barrier shield. Just her, no bulletproof security, no police. Just soft blonde hair flowing behind her ears, a pale salmon messenger bag that she pulled out front so she could tighten her fingers around the top of it. He noticed painted fingernails: just a few shades off her skin tone, made her fingers longer, fused into the tips. Genji realized he had never seen her without gloves on.

 

He scampered over and wrapped his hands around the bars. Her pupils shrank, focusing on his green eyeframe, his segmented fingers, his chest pumping sharp but slow past the double-layer of security. With a deep breath, Angela smiled at him. The press conference cameras had not lied about her weight loss, but he thought there was pink in her skin now, softness around her hanging bones. She took one hand off her bag to rest her fingers on the barrier hardlight. Her fingertips paled from pressure applied to the translucent shield. He squirreled a couple fingers through to meet hers, the nose of his helmet poking at the space between the bars.

 

Her eyes ducked away from his face, fled to the floor. She retained her smile, tight and involuntary between her shallow cheeks. Her hand lingered beside his on the shield.

 

“Why are you here, Genji?” she inquired-- in English, so her accent twirled edges into the words. Not that he was in any position to judge. He supposed not everyone retained Japanese like Jesse. At that moment, he thought he would like to learn what Angela had spoken as a girl.

 

“I wanted to know if you were okay,” he responded in kind. “I saw news about the organization. Your hospital there was…” She clasped her hands in a skinny triangle over her nose and mouth, blinking at him. Genji saturated the green in his visor. “Sorry I am late.” Hints of him reflected on her face. She was blushing when she dropped her hands away. Her lips crushed together, wrinkling the coral bow shape.

 

“You came all the way here.”

 

“Well, I love you, Angela!” he declared. “Also I do not know your Net ID, so I could not text you.”

 

“Please forgive me,” she murmured.

 

“Huh? I cannot forgive you!” He touched a victory sign to the hardlight. “You have not done anything wrong. You are my number one girl, who saved my life…remember?”

 

Angela shut her eyes, face turning away from him and the bars. “You are crushing your bag,” he observed. Her fingers relaxed out of their dagger furrows in the suede. She smiled at him again. Weaker, smaller this time. His visor fluttered. She took a step back from the barrier, and lifted her head to something above the top of the cell; he guessed a camera.

 

“It was a misunderstanding,” she said to the unseen device. The barrier dropped, and he let go of the bars as the door slid open. Angela lifted her hand to the exit. “I will take you to the house. We have many items to discuss.”

 

“Do you know the Commissioner?” he asked as he stepped out of the cell.

 

“Hm?” Angela wondered back at him as they walked down the hall together. He was close enough to hold her hand. Soft and thin and still precise in her heels, her hair nearly white in the corridor lights, Angela invited him away from his thoughts. His meditations.

 

Genji stopped. Angela paused at his side, fingers rubbing her messenger bag again. He searched the space around them, and returned to the cell. Zenyatta’s faceplate lifted at him when he reappeared in the doorway. Genji stared at the monk. An electrical knife traced his spine and twitched against his processor.

 

“S-sorry,” he mumbled. He held out his hand. Zenyatta flowed out to him. “I don’t…why did I…” Zenyatta’s lights did not look turquoise, but Angela’s iris-blue. “Can’t think.” Genji’s synth peaked high as he shook his head. “I’m sorry!”

 

“I will be with you,” Zenyatta soothed.

 

“Thank you, always.” Genji shuddered. “Always.”

 

Angela stood where he had left her, massaging her messenger bag. “This is Zenyatta,” he announced, the omnic moving forward in the cool light. “He is helping me.” Such a paltry introduction; he felt red shooting up his cheeks. “He is free as well?” he begged for permission. “He can come?”

 

Angela looked from Zenyatta hovering mid-air to Genji’s dulling visor, and nodded.

 

“I am pleased to finally meet you,” Zenyatta said. “After hearing so much.” He brought his hands together under his golden chin. Angela pushed her bag back over her hip, approaching him. She held out her hand. They shook, eyes on eyes.

 

“Hey,” Genji muttered, feeling at first like he was intruding on some other conversation. “Can you tell the police to return my swords too?”

 

Angela’s face flattened in disappointment, a relief after the array of expressions she had shown so far today.

 

“I had hoped you’d lost them.”

 

“Not at all! Mr. Reyes put a lot of effort into them. They are very well-made, and they still hook up great with my system.” Genji pointed at his head. “Sometimes I need them too, like when we met Jesse.”

 

“Jesse…McCree…?” Angela asked slowly, in growing horror. She shook her head. Genji reached his arm out, and Angela unsteadied in surprise, rocking back from him, then straightening and holding still. He tucked a curl of her hair behind her ear, and glowed his visor at her.

 

She messed with the errant hairstrings herself, leading him again. “Let us review your travels in the car,” she grumbled. “We can pick up your weapons at the desk.”

 

* * *

 

Angela left them on the stoop of the granite house, surrounded by the pillars holding up its three-story façade. She said she had some business to attend first, and disappeared inside with a couple of the flak soldiers. Genji and Zenyatta stood obediently in the glow of the yellow house lights for the first minute. Zenyatta’s head turned to the laughing of water on the east side. He floated off. Genji glanced between the closed door and his drifting mentor. He followed Zenyatta.

 

“I would like you to think of a thing you want. Not a person, or a feeling, but a thing.”

 

“This does not sound like a meditation to be encouraged,” Genji chuckled. “Alright. I have thought of it.”

 

“Imagine how you would attain this thing, starting right now, from this spot.”

 

After a few minutes, Genji groaned.

 

“I’m sorry, Zen. I cannot think of how. There is no leaving this place. Angela needs me.”

 

“What was the thing you wanted?”

 

“A pair of pants.” Genji indicated Zenyatta’s legs with a careless tip of his hand from his wrist. “You are looking threadbare again.” Zenyatta examined his yellow trousers and probed one finger through an unpatched hole by his knee. “Actually what I thought was to bring you back to the monastery, and gather the cotton and wool. But I am not sure that is a ‘thing’.”

 

“Perhaps I have only become one end of a string that binds you.”

 

“You are not making any sense, Zen.”

 

Angela found them seated on an arched walkway above a pond. Zenyatta rested his sandal-toes in the water, Genji bent one knee over the walkway. Dragonflies fixed across Zenyatta’s carapace like green bows, guppies with shining spotted tails swam up and investigated his feet with their extendable mouths. Both wanderers watched a soft white blob on Genji’s arm. The blob poked out its dull thumb of a head as Angela neared, cocking a black eye at her.

 

“Look! I got it to sit on me,” Genji crowed. “I held very still and pretended I was dead.” He thrust his arm and the turtledove toward her, and the bird swept off into the safety of the night canopy. “Oh… Are all the birds here tame?”

 

“I must admit, I have not come out to see this part until today.”

 

“This is not your residence?” Zenyatta asked.

 

“It belongs to an associate of mine. I am only staying here until the hospital is on its feet. I wouldn’t know what to do with so much space…” Angela looked around the chirping treetops.

 

“Are those people with guns keeping you inside the house?” Genji asked.

 

“They are not restricting my movement.” Angela clasped her hands together in front of her chest. “They are here for my protection.” Her fingers twisted into claws against one another. “May I join you?” she eked out, brow knit. Genji patted the bridge plank at his side. She nodded, smiling hastily, and shed the brown wings of her overcoat. She handed it off to one of the armed women at her back, and she was blue underneath all the way up her neck, but the bones of her shoulders lay bare. “The perimeter, please,” she said to the women, dismissing them into the night.

 

She circled the purple-flowered rim of the pond glass, the lantern drones nesting along the path gifting her with many shadows. When she sat with a careful cross of legs at Genji’s side, a silver cross winked from her neck in the imitation hearth light. She wound a weak arm around his, spreading her fingers above his, and tucked her cheek to his shoulder. He entertained the notion of telling Zenyatta to go help secure the perimeter.

 

Angela sat up from him. She smiled at his arm-- not him, but just the arm she had set upon so briefly and sweetly. She folded her hands in her lap.

 

“Are you in danger because of the organization?” he asked. “No one could find you after. Did you have to hide?”

 

“I was helping a friend.” Her head leaned back, shadows drawn down the sides of her face, wrapping around her neck. “Publicity was not in his best interests. But my hope is that, outside of U.N. hearing councils, Overwatch is allowed to rest. My current problem likely relates to the hospital. It is very political.”

 

“A hospital is?”

 

“Any attempt to integrate services is. This country is split presently, with the Ministries in their enclave, and everyone else left to fend for themselves. This is a step toward peace, and healing. It is worth it.” She looked into Genji’s eyes. “The problem is I have a ghost.” His visor blinked.

 

“You are being literal?” Zenyatta wondered.

 

“It’s a convenient term, for a phenomenon I have yet to decipher.” Her gaze adjusted to Genji’s arm again. She stroked his shoulder, depressing her fingers into the coolant emergence points glowing on top. “He has been breaking into the house…” Angela let go of Genji and rubbed the side of her finger along her eye socket. “Visiting me in my sleep.”

 

“He hurt you?” Genji demanded.

 

“An assassin for a figurehead would be logical, yes.” She broke a shiver from her shoulders. “But all he has done is ask for my help.”

 

“Help with what?” the cyborg sniffed.

 

“I think it might be just for himself. Just like a ghost.” Angela watched the fish rising and falling from the depths, tricked by the ripples off Zenyatta’s submerged toes over and over again. “No matter what he says or does, it is really a cry for help.” Her face shadowed in a grimace of thin, starved muscles. “But I cannot help what he is.”

 

The forgot-me-not shades of her upper eyelids drooped. “Not without analysis equipment anyway. And he kept coming to see me, but he would not stay with any sense of convenience. I have been a little tired from it. Perhaps it is a psychological method, trying to scare me away from my work, or cause me to lose my way, discrediting the institution by proxy.”

 

“A dragon does not care if his enemy is living or dead,” Genji proposed softly. “If it is in this world, he will consume--”

 

“You musn’t Genji!” Dragonflies scattered from Zenyatta’s faceplate. Angela’s voice echoed in the high orchard branches. Genji’s visor fluxed bright. He shook his head.

 

“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t mind if it hurts.”

 

Angela’s hand trapped his wrist, her arm shaking as she tried to apply force he could feel.

 

“Swear to me you will not call it.” His hand dangled in her grip. He knotted his fingers in against his palm. Was he so horrifying to see?

 

“Alright.”

 

“I am not even sure he is a problem anymore.” Angela spoke rapidly now. “When I started placing inquiries for a security service, he disappeared. It has been a couple weeks.” Her tone spiked warm with humor: “Perhaps he is shy.” She released him and clapped her hands together. Genji rubbed his freed wrist and glanced at Zenyatta. The omnic was staring back, with a clockwork tilt to his faceplate.

 

Angela cleared her throat when no one laughed at her joke. “I would like to request that you go to the hospital with me tomorrow,” she said, voice dried to neutral. “There is urgent maintenance I must perform.” Genji’s visor flickered. He could see from reflections along the water that Zenyatta had been similarly blindsided.

 

“I feel okay, Angela.” He mushed his ribbon to the back of his helmet sheepishly.

 

“Can I ask that…you trust me?”

 

A warm hand cradled the back of his brain beneath his armor. Or not a hand, but a blanket of bandages, tying him up even as he sat like a free beast on the bridge.

 

“I will always trust you.”

 

Her smile wilted up at him.

 

“I know,” she answered. “Can you promise me one other thing?”

 

“Anything.”

 

“You will not see that outlaw Jesse McCree again. He has not been a member of Overwatch for a very long time. He is a dangerous wanted criminal.”

 

“Like my family,” Genji joked.

 

“And look where they got you!” Angela snapped. Genji cocked his head. She brushed the ends of her fingers over her lips. “I apologize. That was unprofessional.”

 

“Zen says it is okay to be angry at Jesse.”

 

“Please promise me.”

 

Genji ducked his head, not so much to consider the proposal as to conjure the right tone from his synthesizer. The same he had often used on his father:

 

“Okay!”

 

* * *

 

Angela went to sleep lying on her back, but Genji heard her shifting under the covers and looked to see her wrapped around herself on her side, face taut. She did not make any noise, so he leaned back toward the open window. She allowed him the watchdog bench beneath it, listening to the visitations of warm breezes. Zenyatta had long gone to bed in another room, and suggested he do the same, that the hired professionals could handle any incursion.

 

Genji drooped his head along the bench back. 3:00AM and no sign of ghosts. It might be hard to see one approaching through the symmetric rows of the orchard, but if it wanted Angela it would have to come through the window. He picked at the wood grain of the bench. The temperature of the sky warmed from black to eggplant. He searched the net: _Jesse McCree_

_CRISIS WAR MACHINE COLLAPSES DURING MANHUNT FOR DEADLOCK GANG LEADER_

_The notorious desert Pegasus was damaged by infighting among members of the Deadlock Gang, causing it to collapse as Federal investigators engaged in a stand-off with the Gang’s leader, Jesse McCree. Investigators confirmed McCree was inside the unit before it crashed to the ground. Current whereabouts of the outlaw are unknown, but several bodies have been discovered beneath the wreckage. A source close to the investigation says officials are confident one of the bodies will eventually be identified as McCree’s._

A picture of the Pegasus, its tower neck fallen, body crunched against its treads, headlined the article. Genji opened his contacts.

 

_karroten: Are you still alive?_

Something made an erratic flight between the treetops. Genji flexed on his nightvision: a dove landed on a branch, head twisting about mindlessly.

 

_docholly12: ofc. u worried???_

_karroten: I was just wondering._

_docholly12: uh huh. whats w/ fancy typin_

_karroten: I do not have to type. I send the message directly._

_docholly12: did you ask mercy abt Gabe yet_

_karroten: No._

_docholly12: don’t forget!! i gtg_

Angela stretched out with a groan around 5:00AM, as Genji headed to the door. She sat out of the covers and blinked at him, eyelids pink, the blue of each iris waxy.

 

“Sorry,” he said. “I was just going to meet Zenyatta.”

 

“I slept well.” She sounded surprised. She pulled her bare legs out from under the covers and sat on the side of her bed in her pale blue chemise. Her tongue poked to the corner of her lip. “I wonder if the heat aura associated with your abilities has any restorative properties. It would be very interesting--” The word warped as she yawned. “--to study.” She pushed herself off the bed and headed for the bathroom.

 

“Now you sound like yourself,” Genji praised, watching her saunter off with her hair undone and her skin aglow in the morning light.

 

* * *

 

A poster in the hospital lobby read _OASIS: The World’s Scientific Capital and Capital._ It showed scientists in lab coats assembling beneath a plastic reservoir waterfall, a tower in the background completing an arrow into the sky. Under the poster sat an old woman in a lavender frock, muttering soft curses and exacerbating her wrinkles as she stared into her phone. Genji lifted on his toes while security patted him down, trying to decide if she needed assistance, trying not to stare.

 

Angela returned from speaking with the omnic and human at the front desk.

 

“Follow me.”

 

She levered open a heavy door down the hall, and excused herself to a prep room in the back. The lights switched on automatically as she crossed the operation suite, swamp green patient slab glowing to life beneath a spotlight. Metal instruments hung off the ceiling above, coiled in like the dead legs of a spider. Genji was still hovering in the doorway when she came back, Zenyatta his shadow.

 

Angela unpacked an old datapad from her messenger bag, and Genji recognized the scratches along the side. “It’s alright,” she said, with an absent glance his way as she linked the datapad and patient table console. Cables dropped from the ceiling, awaiting ports to access. A machine block on the wall juggled fluid inside its shell, _plip-plip-plip._ Another mechanism, a black semi-circle on the ceiling beside the tools, ticked like a clock. “Come in.”

 

“You said I have to sleep?”

 

“For safety.” Angela cleared her throat, and floated her gloved hand by her neck without gracing the skin. Genji took a step inside, and her eyes rose from the screens to him. “One of the things they tell us in school is that everything we do looks frightening and cruel. But to leave you as you are, that would be the cruelty. Know that I am committed to undoing my mistakes.”

 

“Is there a camera?”

 

“A camera? No…” She narrowed her eyes, and frowned at him. “No one is going to watch. I actually can’t ever let anyone know I am doing this.”

 

“That makes me feel a lot better,” he gushed, approaching close enough to rest his hand on the corner of the examination table. She webbed her fingers over the back of his helmet, and her hand traveled down the air to the join of his shoulders. Angela leaned around his back, sizing up her task. Her head rose to Zenyatta as the omnic attempted a covert settling in the corner of the room.

 

“And him?” she asked Genji. “Typically, loved ones do not belong in the room for this kind of work.”

 

“Zen is okay.” Genji lifted his visor over his shoulder at the omnic. “He thought this might be a result of our meeting again. I guess he sees the future. He asked if he could observe. I bet he wants to learn from you! Sometimes I get hurt.” He raised one half of a prayer under his chin when her eyes fixed on him, wide and clear. “Mostly I just hop out of the way though.”

 

“Why don’t you hop on the table,” Angela muttered dryly. “Remove your helmet and lay down on your stomach, please,” she clarified, louder, after Genji only snickered at her. “Is there something my most important patient has been fighting for, that he needs to spend all his time impersonating a rabbit?”

 

Genji reached for his visor clasps, shaking his head between his poised fingers.

 

“Not really. I just cause a lot of trouble. Maybe Zen can tell you.” The two of them had been relatively silent toward one another. He was reminded of attempts to get Hanzo to join unsanctioned parties. He clicked the visor frame out and his vision blacked till he opened his eyes. The moist atmosphere of the hospital tickled his skin. The air was dimmer and less colorful: Angela’s eyes and her scrubs and the table were all the same shade of blue-green. “Could you fix my mistakes too?” He showed her his hand, its awkward clutch around the detached visor, fingers twitching numbly _._ “If I could hold things besides the sword--”

 

She threw herself against his chest, squeezing her arms around his shoulders.

 

“I should have done what my heart told me to,” she swore. “I used to think compassion was the enemy of good medicine. I didn’t understand, not until it was too late. Listen, I don’t have the right equipment here, but there is a place.”

 

“Oasis,” he answered. She blinked. “I saw the ad.” Genji wagged his finger.

 

“We can go…” He had never heard her so full of longing. “For you, we can.” Angela’s eyes were shiny, and she could not dislodge the moisture in blinking. It hung in her like stars. “Ach-- I have to change again!” she exclaimed, pulling her gloved hands away from him and standing back with them held up like helpless paws, laughing.

 

A scream broke through the hallway door. “What?” Angela breathed, mouth still agape in laughter, eyes still aglow with water. Zenyatta raised his head at the doorway, blue indicators flashing onto their brightest setting. The low, lazy _thump_ of an explosive rattled the thick door in its frame. “What?” Angela exclaimed again, a hint of voice box in the word now as she craned her neck straight, searching the walls, forgetting to blink. Genji slipped his eyeframe back into place, and her surgical focus veered to him as the green light emerged. “No…”

 

The lights went out, secondary blue and red LEDs knocking open across the walls as the hospital generator kicked on with a heavenly whine. Genji flinched at the first popcorn burst of gunfire, but turned around and went to the door alongside Zenyatta. Another thin cry outside ended in the pock of a grenade. He thought of his swords, but Angela had made him leave them at the house. Outside the door crawled a hiss of vapor, growing giant and serpentine. Angela joined them. Her eyes rolled up at the ceiling, he saw her mouth _please,_ but when he followed her gaze he only saw the carousel of medical tools.

 

She darted away and rummaged in her messenger bag. Zenyatta touched the door, then looked up at him: it was cool. Zenyatta depressed the lever and coils of white smoke spilled through the growing gap.

 

“It is a smoke grenade, Angela.” Genji referenced her in the back of the room, where she was deactivating the safety on a white bolt pistol. “The ones out front, they will not be able to…” He gestured at his black throat cords.

 

“I don’t have my gear,” she said, then laid down the gun and ran to a cupboard beside the prep room. As she flung open the shutters, the operation suite fell awash with neon blue. Angela ran her arms back and forth over the light. Genji followed Zenyatta out, shutting the door on Angela’s frantic search, dragging on the lever to close it tight to the frame.

 

Ghost smoke stained the halls, roved over the tile with warty, seeking arms. Genji took Zenyatta’s hand. He cleared some of the murk with his nightvision overlay, and led his teacher through silent red alarms toward the lobby. Those found collapsed along the way they tucked into exam rooms, closets, any room whose door had a rubber foot cutting off the airflow from the corridor. Zenyatta touched each soul briefly, enough to ease the blotchy crimson across their throats.

 

The lobby: edges of the dome space glittered with clouds and exploded boils of blood. Gray grenade shells puffed their last on the floor. Seven people stood in the fading toxins before the reception desk. A flat cracking sound and the merry tootling of the elevator alerted Genji to two more on the other side. They called the elevator car and winched the door open. One used a makeshift jack to lever the car out of position, exposing the shaft.

 

Zenyatta tried to peek out with him. Genji tucked him against the wall, behind a stack of gurneys. He flattened to the ground and investigated the central seven: dark blue tactical frames, silvery skull faceplates with long slashes for eyes. They could have been omnic, but they had hulls of muscle, and he could see them breathing. At the tip of their phalanx stood a woman in a less comprehensive gas mask and goggles, a capillary of purple dripping from her naked ear. Her long trench belted carelessly at her waist, a vee cut up her chest and filled with drained, drowned skin. Maybe that was some new fashion, ruined in her case by the bloodied edge of her translucent white scarf. Her ear oozed all over it.

 

Thick strapping bound her shoulder, suspending a canister the size of a small child at her side, at least a third of her body weight in tubular metal. _She_ could be a machine, he thought. She did not appear to breathe. She was very still.

 

A nurse mushed a couple patients out of the opposite hospital wing, their smocks caught by the scruff in his fists. Genji tightened, bending his knee forward into a ready crouch. The people must not have been able to see. All their faces were bloody red, little spurts of liquid escaping their nostrils and eyes. The nurse wept loudly as their strides lengthened, silhouettes plunging toward the misted sun past the warped frames of the security scanners.

 

Not a single gun muzzle followed their noisy retreat. The soldiers and the woman in the red goggles remained statue-still aside from the two chewing at the floor of the elevator. Soldiers’ red eyes turned across the misty air toward Genji; he withdrew behind the gurneys.

 

“Are any of them alive?” he asked Zenyatta, pointing through the piled beds at the desk where the receptionists lay collapsed over their chairs.

 

“One,” Zenyatta answered. He did not add anything about old women in waiting area chairs. Genji lowered his head, and replayed his view of the reception desk, examining the bodies he had seen in patches through the smoke.

 

“The omnic?” With a line of blue paint along his jaw seam. Genji could just make out the yellow crackle of his signal array under a wash of blood from the human slumped against him. Zenyatta nodded.

 

“I do not believe their peace is in earnest.”

 

Genji extruded shuriken between his knuckles and kindled the white-green of his visor.

 

“Me either.”

 

Zenyatta turned his hands over his knees, metal ruddy in the auxiliary light, greasy with smoke. His orbs turned a sharper orbit, and he spooled energy from one. He touched his golden favor to the back of Genji’s neck.

 

“I will walk with you, my dear friend.” His array brightened, white holes in the fabric of the universe, stars in the eclipsing dark. Genji passed his first trio of throwing stars into his left hand, and drew three more on the right. He could make up for a lack of swords. His brother’s words did not come to him. No family oath or cry of vengeance colored his heart as he looked at Zenyatta. He supposed he would stay silent, except for:

 

“Sorry, Angela.” The dragon unfurled from the kiss of Genji’s meeting shoulders, eyes opening within a green aurora. He rang his windpipes against the smoky air, birdsong from beneath the earth transforming to a tiger’s snarl. Scales traced the dragon’s body over Genji’s shoulder, speckling into existence to the sound of water falling across a river face. He hatched down the metal frame small but noisy, striated belly scraped through the weak electric nerves of Genji’s arm. Horns plunged out of his skull smooth and coiled just as he slid across Genji’s fingers. The dragon yawned his fangs and whiskers out, maw sparking as he bellowed at the omnic before him.

 

Genji moved his left hand toward his prickling arm, the dragon’s replacement of wires with cactus rinds. He dropped his fingers before they touched the radiant spirit. “Please don’t be afraid,” he moaned at Zenyatta, hand rising, then abandoning its attempted salve again. He thought of Angela’s horror-filled warning. “I promise…” His visor fogged as the dragon felt up his spine in slow, curious lightning. “…this is just me.”

 

“This is how you have always been, Genji,” Zenyatta said, face following the spiny twists of the beast. His synth broadcast warm befuddlement. “What do I have to fear?”

 

Genji shuddered before his teacher, heat spikes branching and blooming under his white armor. He held out his left hand over Zenyatta’s head, relaxing the shuriken to the backs of his fingers. Zenyatta gazed up at him, lifting his chin in a small nod. Genji held the back of that reflective silver head, and touched the lip of his faceplate to the omnic lights.

 

“Here we go,” he whispered. He stood up, the dragon drawn into the catalysts between his fingers, every light on his body fighting the somber crimson of the hospital. Boots approached the gurney stack. Pivoting on his narrow steel ankles, Genji swung his left hand of stars into the neck of the investigating soldier. The force of the green shuriken blades diced a diagonal of the torso, and flung the corpse off his feet, landing in halves at the base of reception.

 

“ _Genji!_ ”

 

Bullets began as he looked over his shoulder; had never heard Angela shriek like that. It was strange: she moved in a kind of slow motion, blue chemical packs falling out of her arms as she reached for him. Tears glassed her eyes, her mouth was a wide hole of screams. Was he so horrible to see? “I said no!” she cried. Then why run toward him? The bullets: he could not block all of them, he was too narrow. He could only stop the source, and he raised his other arm full of shuriken, the dragon winding in his cables.

 

* * *

 

Time went missing.

 

* * *

 

He was falling to the waxen tiles.

 

Dropping stars rang the floor around him, the neon fading from their deadly edges as they scattered. His body jerked, full of gunfire, but he thought it had been all belly, all non-vital. Then why? He could not even turn his head. His helmet striking the ground became a thunderclap. Pressure burst out of his bones in a silken wraith, climbing inside him up his throat and into his head. He smothered within his protective shell. The green light vanished, and he too was gone.

 

* * *

 

Blood vessels popped in her cheeks as she coughed explosively on the remaining smoke, staggering toward Genji.

 

“I’m sorry.” She could not even breathe and she was trying to speak to the body. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” A bullet sailed past her cheek, but with the hostile blown open and grounded, the soldiers soon stopped firing. And here she came, the babbling witch, breath like cancer. “I’m s--” Her throat cleared itself and she rammed her shoulder to the wall for balance.

 

Angela wiped the back of her hand across her slobbering mouth, eyes already traitors, following the trail of blood from Genji to the man he had cut in half during his brief stint as a hero. Movement from the center group, the veiny leader unhitching the cap on the front of the canister she carried. Angela sniffled, rubbing smoke from her tear ducts with her unsanitary glove. “Amélie?”

 

Beneath her goggle visor, the woman’s yellow eyes twitched at Angela. Amélie wasted a split-second of her attention on the doctor’s tremoring jaw, then her eyes dropped to a dark gush of fluid that expelled around her hand before she could fully unscrew the canister top.

 

With a few porcelain twists of her arm, Amélie pulled the cap away. Black broth slopped onto the floor at her feet. Angela depressed the side of her hand to her nose: copper, sharp even through the burning air. Shaking the canister and thumping the heel of her palm on the base, Amélie dumped out the last few patters of tar, bubbling chunks of semi-solid following. Angela spotted the briefest outline of a hand in the plummeting sludge, wrist bones broken clear out of the flesh.

 

The puddle spread across the floor as a spiral with many arms, center bulging upward.

 

Across Genji’s body, lights lost power. Zenyatta tucked arms beneath his chest to lift him. The prosthetic trunk twitched, lifted an arm in spasm. The legs trembled, arching uncoordinated at the knees. Zenyatta looked back and forth along the length of him. Angela’s knees crashed to the floor beside the omnic’s, and she wrestled Genji from his tightening hands.

 

“It is not helping,” she heard him chatter out, his lights pulsing. “This is an intentional function…?”

 

“Let me fix him,” she wheezed. “I can fix him.” She bent Genji over himself, revealing his silver neck scales. A yellow energy residue flickered to the top of Genji’s head when she tried swatting it out of her way. Zenyatta’s steady hands became her tools. She posed the omnic at the top of the head and the shoulders, then pressed down to guide him into keeping the area relatively still while she bloodied her fingers and broke her nails trying to pry the shining armor open.

 

No luck. She stood, at the mercy of the onlooking soldiers as she scavenged her dropped medpacks. Zenyatta watched silently. His skinny arms eventually reached out and helped her gather the chemicals. She showed him how to administer the blue canister tips to the ports on Genji’s back. “Keep draining them,” she demanded, and stumbled back to the operation suite.

 

She returned to see life birthed at the toe of Amélie’s high heels. One spiral arm of the black sludge detached in sticky snaps from the floor, wrapping against Amélie’s pallid ankle. Eyes half-lidded, Amélie pulled out a small tube like a lipstick. She applied the red tip to the stringy extension and it disintegrated in a fizzle of electricity. Her calf tightened till the connection burnt out.

 

“That way,” she said, bending and pushing the quivering bolus of the sludge toward the splayed figures around the reception desk. The puddle shambled along the front of the desk, feeling out with its longest portions, arms that dropped out of existence as fast as they formed. Amélie stared at a brown-red residue left on her fingers.

 

Angela heard someone gurgle and cough their way into breathing, each exhale like the crack of an oily bubble. Someone on the staff, still alive. But a patient already lay in front of her.

 

With the vice and lever she brought, she wrenched up the rigid neck panels. She used auto-tightening tweezers to draw the handful of bright red cables flowing from central processing. After looping out excess from the spinal column to give herself slack to work with, she extracted one centimeter at a time from the base of Genji’s neck. Spongy yellow crusting appeared, threaded in and out of the cables and supporting a paper-thin chunk of plasmetal with _26_ scrawled on it in Magic marker.

 

Angela shook a self-heating knife to activate the glow on the blade and cut the threads, extraneous webbing falling in black, smoky flashes. There were so many attachments, the tensile wires so microscopic, she had to judge the remaining connection by pulling on _26_ and seeing if the cables twitched after it. Eventually she threw the plasmetal plate against the wall without any movement from the core wiring.

 

Genji heaved a few more times under her and Zenyatta’s arms before his body went still. Zenyatta maintained one hand on his back, and picked up the discarded object in his other hand, turning his expressionless head at it. Angela called him back with a shoulder touch. She led his hands to apply the remaining medical paste directly over the exposed cables.

 

Her own fingers went to the pile of tools she had retrieved from the operation suite. Among them, a white-and-black pistol.

 

She got to her feet. Stepped around Genji and Zenyatta, slipped on the yellow webbing strewn around the floor, kicked its grimy strings off the heel of her doctor’s slippers. She stood between her patient and the lobby, hand tingling as it gripped the gun hilt. One of the soldiers whistled the others, and they leveled their rifles on her. Did not fire. Angela glanced at her pistol, its snub nose hanging at the tiles, blood from her fingernails running down its sides. Why? What did they need to save their ammunition for in a hospital?

 

The sludge was gone. Angela’s eyes flicked to the floor before her first, then the walls, the segues to the ceiling. Amélie laughed at her, withered, on the edge of dust. _Not_ Amélie. Angela mouthed at the other woman, her own lips dry too, finally catching enough air to call her name. Amélie stopped laughing. One of the dead receptionists squirmed in her chair, shoulders seesawing left and right. Angela’s eyes, summoned by the motion, arrived in time to detect a swell up the woman’s neck that ejected from her mouth as black smoke.

 

 _Oh,_ the doctor thought vacantly as murky pollutant spiraled from the corpse’s nostrils, seeped from the bottoms of her rolled back eyeballs, and leaked around the architecture of her earlobe. The receptionist’s skin slackened as smoke expanded over her head in beats, a heart swelling on its every operation. Twitching metallic objects glittered on the edges of the darkness. Angela could almost hear chimes.

 

As the smoke grew, the panting she’d recognized earlier deepened. Uneven wings sprouted, malformed lungs that bulged ever outward through broccoli head protrusions and cancerous warts, gasping. Ethereal balance atop the woman lost, the mass fell onto the omnic next to her. The omnic’s arms twitched up in response, good evidence of the smoke’s newfound weight. They groped at each other, the omnic spurned out of his chair, one hand on the desk and the other grasping ineffectually at the black veil over his face.

 

After a few clumsy throbs, the vapor wormed through the seams in the omnic’s face. The faceplate popped off after some struggling, the omnic shrieking. Black-blue coolant erupted from neck cords yanked into the cloud mass. He raked his fingers one more time through the sticky smoke before it pushed out the top of his skullcap, exposing the processor, from which it began lapping silvery nanite fluid. The omnic pitched forward onto the desk, fingers clenching in mindless reflex motions. Like an infant, Angela thought.

 

The wings of smoke separated: flower petals, then elongation into the many oily arms of a squid. Appendages slapped together, fusing on contact, ripping apart again. By luck two masses remained adhered, and began collaborating on less fluid anatomy. A misty black hand spoked out and clutched the desktop, pats of blood and sludge squirting out as the fingers applied pressure. The beating center of the cloud assembled the naked musculature of a back. Even in pieces, she knew him by the desperate clutches of his heavy breath.

 

Her ghost.

 

The soldiers swiveled their guns to him as he collected mass.

 

She exhaled and slipped her hands over the topmost gurney in the stack beside her. Resting her pistol on the mesh, she pulled the gurney down and guided it to the floor as its flight mechanism activated. As it detected the ground, it lay flat. Angela cleared the empty medpacks piled around Zenyatta. He was holding the face of Genji’s helmet to his own plate, whispering in a language she did not recognize. It was not Japanese, which she would know even if she had not kept up with it.

 

There was a time when it would not have mattered if she practiced. Sighing, she tapped Zenyatta’s wrist. His head snapped up, voice synth muting.

 

“We will take the fire exit. Help me.” She pointed her chin at the gurney, and seized Genji’s waist. She expected the typical tonnage people always seemed to gain when they were incapacitated.

 

Genji was impossibly light. Zenyatta held his legs opposite her, but soon let go, and yet she did not struggle to lay her patient across the board. Zenyatta gathered the cables, stroked the red wires into a smooth column, and laid them out along Genji’s side. Angela belted the gurney with a button press. She checked the lobby over Zenyatta’s shoulder.

 

Intestines and heart refused to sit still inside the frame the ghost drew for them. Unformed extra limbs sloughed out of his center, his one solid arm trembling over the desk. Amélie approached him with a suitcase in her hand. She grabbed his wrist, squeezing till he released his death grip on the furniture. Her next step was sliding the suitcase handle under his fingers: he clutched his talons, but the handle dropped through and the case clunked to the desk.

 

“Concentrate,” Amélie ordered, and passed the case to him. He dropped it again. Sighing, she pointed to the soldier cut apart on the floor.

 

Then she pointed at Genji.

 

The ghost climbed over the desk bar, semi-grounded and stumbling, collapsing on the dead soldier in a cloud. Most of his mass lingered outside the body this time. The smacks and swallowing sounded to Angela equally like kissing and chewing. She pulled out the pistol from the side of the gurney and stalked forward to interpose herself.

 

The ghost stood. He plodded toward her, feet bare and bleeding, arms swaying, guesses at limbs rather than meaningful neurologic connections. His chest and shoulders alone towered past her. A portion of his height went undescribed, his translucent figure lacking a head. The conflagration in his neck flexed, inadvertently piping some of the last white smog from the air. He stopped, naked esophagus dilating as he hacked at the air, curls of smoke falling from every layer of his body.

 

“I can’t breathe,” he groaned, wrapping a thick hand around his throat. “I can’t bre--” A cough of refuse bloomed from the throat opening.

 

“I want to help you,” Angela swore. “But you must help me first.” She kept the pistol barrel at his chest. The semi-exposed heart was an easy aim. The red glare of the auxiliary LEDs was the best light she had ever seen him in. His body solidified with each passing moment, pouring curtains of meat over the main cavities, butchering out the muscle shapes. Sweetbreads settled to their instinctive homes. “You have to stop,” she ordered, raising the pistol so he could see-- see? --the twinkle off its plastic casing.

 

“You…” He was coughing again. Self-destructive tremors of black lungs filled his chest.

 

The fit passed. He stood tall before her. “Left…behind…” he growled. His arm hefted level at her head, hand gone, limb terminating in a metal block with a spiral orifice hardening at the end. He twitched a partially formed finger against the base. Angela crossed her arms over her eyes.

 

A spout of blood and nascent organs pushed out of the barrel. The ghost screamed, clutching his other arm to his stomach.

 

Why did she recognize him then, as he hunched over, naked and squalling, bleeding everywhere? Not when he stood, not for the breadth of his powerful arms? The case had built in his proportions, the weight of muscle he painted himself with. But it was his vulnerability that she suddenly knew.

 

“Gabriel?” Her throat drained with the name, eyes sticking wide open. “What happened?”

 

And she walked toward her ghost as he wept. “Why did you never say anything?” To say she had been afraid of him, to say he asked for help, had never been the entirety. Her slippers warmed, soaking his blood from the floor.

 

“Reaper,” Amélie called. His neck broke to twist after her voice. She gestured to a purple-faced body in one of the waiting area chairs.

 

“Try this, it is bound to be less feisty,” she said. Reaper dropped the pretense of a body and crawled along the floor, mounting up the chair to feast. When he rose, Amélie handed him the suitcase and it stayed in his grasp. She opened a hologram blueprint of the hospital’s foundation from her phone. “All the way down, to the power grid access. You activate it, then you walk out.”

 

“I walk out,” he grumbled.

 

“Do you remember the code?” she asked. Reaper went silent, aside from his sickly attempts at breath. His neck twitched toward his shoulder, and Angela beyond, as he rotted where he stood next to his new associate.

 

“Amélie,” he answered, tone drifting.

 

“Widowmaker,” she corrected, and repeated herself: “Do you remember the code?” Reaper’s neck adjusted in angular twitches to examine Genji on the floor behind Angela.

 

“Yes.”

 

Widowmaker planted her hand to his back, palm sinking into the soft foundation. She tried to shove him at the elevator. Her hand ended up plunging through what should have been a spine, and he groaned. He walked off the impalement and approached the elevator on his own.

 

“Talon will remember you. I will be waiting. _Au revoir,_ ” Widowmaker told him, right at his side every step. Reaper spat a wordless response, and sank into the gap between the bottom of the car and the shaft, tumbling out of sight. The suitcase caught in the gap for a few seconds before he yanked it free. The traces of black on Widowmaker’s fingers and clothes dissipated with a hiss.

 

She ignored Angela, and spoke rapid French to the rest of her men. They walked calmly to the door, then erupted in gunfire as they mowed down the first responders in the parking lot.

 

The white lights came on. All the bodies lay across the scenery like a play, except for the pruned halves of the soldier, which had to be a prop. Angela heard elevator music for a few seconds, then the elevator smoothly shut its doors with an electronic _ding_.

 

“Gabriel,” she breathed. The pressure in her chest said scream, but what good was making noise? Zenyatta nearly sent her up a wall when he touched her shoulder. He had propped the gurney into the air, and gathered his fingers around one side of it. Angela nodded in little shakes. She showed him to the fire exit.

 

They struggled for a hedge line past the parking lot. Blue banners announcing the hospital flapped from lamp posts overhead. Residents in the neighboring residential district gathered on their porches to ogle.

 

Widowmaker’s heels clacked along the pavement toward them, followed by boot chatter. Zenyatta loosed his hands from his end of the gurney, lights glaring, fading as the woman merely passed them by-- all so she could stand in the shade of a tree at the end of the row. She pulled out a cigarette and sipped the end. She never breathed the smoke back out.

 

Her phone rang, default tone. Widowmaker answered, listened, and said, “Very well. We will head there next.” Vapor pushed out feebly around her words. The phone went in her trench pocket.

 

Zenyatta gripped the end of the gurney again, but Angela looked to her hospital. Freshly opened, no long term care yet, a few odds and ends still lingering in the halls. No fancy plastic finishes on the overhead tool suites to keep them from resembling lawnmowers that would descend on patient’s heads. Not the best-financed operation, but a solid step forward, part of a better world. She already knew what the Widow was waiting for.

 

The hospital exploded.

 

A section of the joined human-omnic Asclepian sigil flew over her head. Widowmaker’s soldiers deployed a small portable barrier. The shock wave ripped dry leaves from the hedges and tossed Angela backward into the road. A skidding hover-car baked her face and shoulder with its blue jets.

 

Laying on the ground. Superheated desert air singed the inflammation in her face. She could not move. Felt tired. Blood pumped out from the top of her head somewhere. The ragged hedges marched on their sides in front of her. Amélie was there, standing at the edge of the steaming concrete lot. Pieces of ash floated around her trench, ajar from her shoulders, covering her only in the barest peasant sense. A coalesced chunk of soot fell from the sky, burning. Amélie stamped it to smolders with her heel.

 

She laid her canister upon the ground. One of the soldiers handed her a small birdcage: a white turtledove sat on a swing inside. Pulling out the dove, Amélie waved it across the burnt piece of trash, then tucked it down the metal tube. The black substance stirred, and crawled into the canister.

 

Amélie, Gérard’s wonderful wife, capped the canister as new sirens filled the air.

 

Angela closed her eyes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : A better world.
>   * _dakimakura:_ although infamously known throughout the Internet as "love pillows" with character prints on them (Matthew Mercer signed a McCree version at a con), these body pillows-- sans erotic prints --are also used by Japanese youth as plush toys/security objects
>   * In their first conversation, Zenyatta and Genji quote the Nepali poet Mohan Koirala (1926-2007). Zenyatta quotes "An Introduction to the Land", and Genji quotes "I Remember". Both are early poems for the author and reference political change. "An Introduction to the Land" in particular discusses the fall of the Rana regime that enforced the Nepali language across the country over various other local languages such as Nepal Bhasa. The Ranas were also responsible for multiple banishments of Buddhist monks from Nepal.
>   * The Rod of Asclepius is a wooden stick with a single snake wrapped around it, representing the Greek god of healing. It is frequently confused with the staff of Hermes, the caduceus. Hermes is the trickster god of traveling sellers and thieves.
>   * Genji thought killing owls was unlucky, but you know what else is unlucky? Chapters numbered THIRTEEN ohohoho!
>   * I forgot to buy Sentai Genji (ﾟДﾟ) so I think I'm fired from writing Genji fanfiction. Waiting on my pink slip from Jeff Kaplan to confirm.
> 



	14. The Dream Called OASIS (I)

 

“Whoa, easy. It’s me.” Sunlight pooled over Jesse’s shoulder, flushing his face and arm to silhouette as he leveraged the katana up. Genji strained across the tarp after the stolen weapon, cuts of flesh and skin dribbling from his prosthetic hands. He relaxed his arm, searching the darkness on his fingers. Propped himself on his slippery wrists and asked where they were. The cowboy stiffened and pushed his hat up his obscured brow. “Damnit.” He hauled into the SUV and pinned Genji to the tarp with his elbow. Genji laid still, but Jesse yelled over him, “I said calm the hell down! Mission’s over!” He dropped something on the soaked blue plastic in front of Genji: his phone. He lassoed the earpiece wire around Genji’s white antenna, dangling the bud next to his faceplate.

 

Jesse thumbed his phone menu, leaving a smudge of cracking brown blood on the screen. “Take a listen,” he puffed, exhausted.

 

Genji woke and most of the room was dark, gentle on newly opened eyes. Singular butterfly wings of sunlight flirted around the corners of a window blind to his right. Familiar gold hovered on his chest, pouring honeyed webs into his heart. He opened his mouth, dry air soaked into his bare lips. Inhaled, exhaled, listened to the needling rustle of his artificial breath in his neck. He sat up and black hair fell across his eyes. Nine muddy blue points rose in front of him as he swung his legs off the side of a mattress. The array before him flickered, trying to brighten but unable to hold onto the light.

 

“Are you seeing a memory?” Zenyatta asked, warm synth a pin emptying the pressure in Genji’s ears. “You were shouting.”

 

“Must have been a dream.”

 

Zenyatta reached at his chest to retrieve the little star clinging to him. When the monk tried herding the energy into the spotty fan of spheres behind him, Genji crossed his hands in the path. He expected the light to pass through ghost-like: it stuck to his palms. He cradled it to his chest, and smiled in the unstable glow of Zenyatta’s face. “I have never been afraid of your true self either.” The sphere the energy belonged to was obvious, blue leylines cracked open on its surface. Genji lifted his hand to the metal, returning the light.

 

Straightening on the mattress, he made note of the reflective marble floor: in that mirror he and Zenyatta sat as wraiths, toes never quite meeting the bronze veins of the earth. Bonsai with curled, drying leaves capped the shelves of an empty bookcase beside the far wall. Two doors, both shut tight. An additional curtained archway anointed at its head with a coiled ammonite shell, the classy code for a bath. Zenyatta watched him as the brightness of the overheads lit to wine and sunset. Genji delicately maneuvered the back of one armored hand across his eye sockets. The white wingtip of his helmet peeked over the armrest of a plushy chair by the bookcase. “I messed up,” he guessed.

 

“This is Oasis,” Zenyatta said. Genji squinted at the amber darkness around them. “We are in the university’s medical facility.” He noticed the monk’s hands digging into each other in his lap, steel fingers trembling against their counterparts. Another mudra he did not recognize. The hiked orbit of the omnic spheres, like a seashell connect-the-dot behind Zenyatta’s head, was new too. “It is daytime, but I have decreased the lighting in this room. This is a guest faculty suite, so there will be no staff or students wandering in. You are safe here.” Genji shook his head, folding his arms over his stomach.

 

“You always think of everything.” His helmet had been parted from him. He mushed both hands into his hair. “Did I…?” No matter where he prodded around his skull and face, it felt intact.

 

“You did not wake as fast as anyone liked.”

 

Genji abandoned his arms to a haphazard cross over the tops of his legs. His chrome pectoral wings glimmered blue under his dropped chin, a reflection of Zenyatta sliding back and forth as he breathed.

 

“The omnic, were you able to save him?”

 

“He and that place are gone from this world.”

 

Genji lifted his dull eyes to the muted ceiling lights and slowly turning fan. “We cannot control every outcome,” Zenyatta added. “I was able to restore you. And your focus was not in doubt.”

 

“It was.” He slipped his legs lower and clacked onto the floor. Genji did not know if it was self-consciousness turned physical, or slippery marble, but he stuttered his first pace. Zenyatta caught his arm before he plunged, his array pulsing intensely before it coughed out dim again. “Angela showed up.” Genji slipped himself free and made a circle around the bed. “See,” he chided the monk. Zenyatta bowed his chin, but Genji could not really call it a nod.

 

 _Angela._ He remembered. She ran to him, reached for him, as bullets tunneled past him toward her-- “Is Angela okay?”

 

Whimpering brined the air, gasped out, gulped down, poorly contained behind the nearest door. Zenyatta looked to the sound, and it metamorphosed deeper, stuffed with harder cries from an inflamed throat. Genji started, and walked over, feet ticking on the marble. Redistribution of the weight on his black footpads turned him silent as he reached the door panel and listened. He groped for the lever, and just before his fingers touched, the decorative door hinges collapsed and the panel retreated into its frame.

 

Waxy sunlight crawled out a portrait window and across a writing desk in what was otherwise another dark room. Angela curled over the desktop, and initially Genji saw her platinum hair tied up neat and shining in the gold hint of Oasis. He moved forward eagerly, only to notice white straps mixed through blonde threads, the patchy pink-white of Angela’s face as she muffled her crying with her left hand. Her right hand was tied around a pen, a real ink pen, scribbling across a memo paper with a palm tree stencil at the top.

 

For a moment, Genji saw his father, powerful hand drawing silky lines down a yellow calligraphy scroll. Then Angela again, her whole body shaking, hair peeling askew from the makeshift tie, her pen scraping out runny jots of English.

 

“Angela…”

 

Her head popped up, one eye more white than iris, glistening brightly. Cotton padding and strokes of bandages captured the other half of her face. Her lone pupil tightened at him like an obturator point.

 

“ _GET OUT!_ ”

 

He veered pencil-straight on the spot. His eyes scattered all over her nest of ink stains, and he locked his arms at his sides, angling forward for apology. _“Get out, Genji!_ ” she demanded, and his precise technique fumbled out of form.

 

He backed up, darted through the bedroom door, and ordered it shut. His body shivered. He knocked his forehead to the door panel, jostling heat out of his eye down his cheek.

 

A golden hand touched his back, and his fever broke into hard, fake breaths. Genji planted the side of his forearm against the door, looking over the round of his shoulder at Zenyatta. He smeared his tricep at his cheek to clean off the water, and cocked his flayed eyebrows. Zenyatta darkened the lower rows of his array and weakly lit the top three lights alone. Panting, Genji grinned.

 

“Shall we see?” Zenyatta proposed, lifting his arm to the blinds on the huge windows and the hearts of sunlight leaking from the upper corners.

 

Genji lifted his chin in a weak nod, flattening his hand on his abdomen as he watched Zenyatta’s silver body erect, reaching for the blind cord. The system had to be electronic, but Zen tugged back a few centimeters with only his hand. Peach and orange blush crawled across the bedroom wall. Zenyatta looked back.

 

“Fine,” Genji exhaled. Zenyatta removed the rest of the blind.

 

Purple water shimmered out to the feet of scarlet mountains, corralled by rings of sand to make giant koi pools full of orange-sailed skiffs. Clouds built towers on the mountaintops. Zenyatta slid open the window, inviting the wind. The cologne of greenery mounted in terraces on the surrounding buildings ruffled through Genji’s hair. Drones with white wings flocked past, carrying shiny bird and rodent skulls in their clasping legs, singing to each other as they wound through the sky. A layered metal spire presided over the city, reaching for heaven, just like the ad.

 

Tentacles of cardamom curled up from a generous window garden wrapping the perimeter of the sill. Seedpods glistened beneath veiny white thumb petals. Genji prodded the side of a stem, blobs of irrigation dew falling on his armor. A _ting_ sounded on the wall behind him: a sunlight-activated holoscreen set to a local news feed, unmuting when he looked at it, hospital wreckage the flavor of the day. The current feature focused on omnics scurrying around a triage camp, caring for victims, supplying the healing hives. The camera zoomed on omnic and human women chatting in Arabic while black smoke streamed across the sky over their shade tent.

 

“Mondatta will see this.” Zenyatta watched the screen too.

 

“You let him know we are safe, didn’t you?”

 

“This morning, I did. What he will see is tragedy accomplishing what he has been unable to, however brief and illusory.”

 

Another scene played: an omnic choosing replacement parts for her arm from a bin, with the assistance of a mother and her little girl. Genji flicked the screen dark with a thought.

 

“If you are worried…” he ventured.

 

“I also told him he may have his ship back.”

 

“Then you plan to walk to Japan once more.” Genji took another breath of Oasis into his eyes. White text glowed over the sky in the upper corner of the windowpane:

 

_It is not enough, what I have done in the past. There is always the future._

_Rita Levi-Montalcini_

Zenyatta offered no defense and leaned closer to the open sunlight. Genji bunched an elbow on the sill, and reclined beside him. Zenyatta’s signal array strengthened to its normal blue consistency. Genji stole glances at the cardamom.

 

“What are you thinking of?” Zen asked.

 

“Angela is not feeling well. But I have only ever seen her drink coffee, and this is not the right color.” He sniffed at the cardamom.

 

“The kitchen is there.” Zenyatta held out his arm toward the second of the closed doors. The kitchen was down a short hallway and full of zebra tiles and skylights. It wrapped around to connect with the living room, and he could hear Angela, so he lifted his weight from his feet to investigate quietly. Zenyatta’s accompaniment was, as always, silent.

 

Refrigerator: full of fish eggs, wine bottles, strangely colored cheeses. Pantry: Genji found a glass bowl and jars of cinnamon and withered _Camellia_. He relented to the windowsill garden, picking the cardamom. Zenyatta tore apart the tea leaves while Genji assembled the other herbs in the bowl. It shattered on his first attempt to ground away the lingering kernels.

 

They began again. He let Zenyatta use the pestle, and added the finished sample to the tea maker unit, which flash-boiled its capsule of water and spit the resulting tea into a mug he fit to its weighted platform. Genji hunkered on the countertop to watch the black mix tumble out. He was adding soymilk when Angela stalked in, an empty cup hanging from her hand, her face a diagram of snow-white creases.

 

_docholly12: hey_

_karroten: Not right now._

_docholly12: do u have a room at the church or did they kick u out w/ the qt monk_

_karroten: I will always have a place there. So will he._

_docholly12: OK thx fair nuff_

Angela spotted him. He bowed, she frowned. Her nose moved a little for the herbal air, and she eyed the omnic beside him before walking to the opposite counter and reaching for a package of premade coffee. Genji carried his mug over and set it on the counter beside hers, nudging it closer with the side of his finger, until the handles touched. Angela looked the offering over. She laid aside the premix packet and picked up the mug. Sipping turned the fold of her lips pink. She waved her hand over the mug, blowing across the top. _Too hot?_ he mouthed, and her frown departed. She watched the black swirls, waiting.

 

A minute later, she tried again. Her eye closed as she swallowed.

 

“Do you cook now, Genji?” she asked in a hoarse crackle of her voice box.

 

“The Shambali taught me tea, though they use the black kind.” He waved his hand at the cardamom in the bedroom window. Angela followed his flailing, glanced at Zenyatta on her way back, and her lips twitched. “Is the green alright?” Genji asked.

 

“It tastes very similar to a cinnamon coffee made in this country. It is familiar.” She smiled. “But more mint.” She watched him over the side of the mug. “We should talk.”

 

“Are you angry with me?”

 

“Not at all.” Her voice lost its grainy cast, blooming out of its weariness. Genji followed her eye to Zenyatta. She took one hand off the mug to pat his white shoulder. “Let’s all take a seat.” He headed for the dining table-- but Angela pulled a stool to the kitchen island, and he returned to accept her lead. Zenyatta joined them, even adjusting a stool out to sit upon. He floated slightly above it. The wind returned, tousling Genji and Angela’s hair, barely ruffling Zenyatta’s smoke-stained yellow trousers.

 

Zenyatta extracted a small tin brick from the couch of his dhoti. He placed it in the center of the island, gleaming on the golden flower countertop.

 

“Could you explain to Genji why this was inside him?”

 

“It’s okay,” Genji answered, and both of them stared. He nodded to his doctor. “You do not have to, Angela.” He had seen the crease in her brow when the object came out. “You are hurt.” Her blue eye traveled to its inner corner, examining the bandage claiming the other half of her face. Her eyelid fell, dimming the color.

 

“I apologize,” she said. He shook his head.

 

“You should not apologize!”

 

“Genji,” Zenyatta called. Genji took a deep breath to look at him. “Set yourself away from impulse. View the world as through this window.” He extended his arm toward the sunny vista of Oasis flowing from the bedroom. “Not something you can affect from this side.”

 

“But, Angela--”

 

“I want to tell you,” she said. Genji fell silent. She raised her fingers white and thin toward the device on the countertop. “This was introduced after your attack on that scoundrel, McCree.” A piece of Genji’s scarred face reflected in the device: a blank gray eye.

 

“My attack?”

 

“In Hanamura.”

 

Genji cocked his head. “At the time,” Angela continued. “Gabriel and I believed you must have suffered a-- we believed your system was not meeting all your needs. It was all over your charts, even after I rebuilt the physical dimension. And Gabriel…” she murmured the man’s name fervently. “…thought this left you vulnerable to manipulation and machine-based interventions. Overwatch’s enemies could seize your abilities for their own.”

 

She made a crux of her hands around the half-empty tea mug, a coil of steam whispering up her white tee to her neck. “We were not inclined to give up on our work. We--” Her eye widened, searching the tabletop fruitlessly. “--compromised. Gabriel got to take you back into the field, but there was a safety. An apoptosis trigger.” She lifted the point of her chin at the device. “In the event that outside approved Overwatch activities your body generates a heat pattern associated with the dragon incarnation, the unit activates and assumes control of central processing, disabling motor functions. It then induces a shutdown of all processing through the dispensation of nanomechanical anti-agents and certain restricted use toxins.”

 

“Do you understand what she is saying?” Zenyatta asked.

 

“You were…” He surveyed the device, smaller than even a child’s phone. “…trying to make it safe.” His eyes lit back up to Angela. She grimaced. He smiled. “Thank you, Angela.” Her lips parted but she was silent. He could see the puffy interior line where the tea had burned her. “You are always looking out for me, in one way or another! If you had done nothing, I may have hurt someone important.” He referenced Zenyatta with a shaky flip of his hand, but Angela swept off her stool with a mumbled _excuse me_ and left the room. Zenyatta’s array was nearly white.

 

“You made a choice to stop,” he countered. “It is different.” Genji watched the wall corner that had taken Angela. After a while, he sank on his stool, and dragged his fingers forward across the table. He bumped the device, brushed it out of the way, and picked his forefinger around the handle of her tea mug. He pulled it over to investigate how much she drank. Mint and cinnamon stung his eyes. That had to be why they grew wet and gauzy.

 

She returned, eventually.

 

“Greetings Angela!” he chirped, and her lower lip quivered when she looked at him. “Perhaps you have removed that thing, and now, I will not have visions anymore!”

 

The doctor’s face smoothed. She blinked slowly.

 

“You have visions?” she inquired in a neutral voice. Genji lined a row of fingers to the side of his black hair.

 

“When there is a loud noise, or I look at something strange. Or I smell something. Or maybe sometimes when I am just standing around,” he chuckled, cheeks a showy pink. “I start feeling bad.”

 

“Elaborate please. What does ‘bad’ consist of?”

 

Genji palmed the cords surrounding his throat paneling, looking to Zenyatta.

 

“Describe it,” Zenyatta said. “It is important to be able to hold it within your mind.”

 

He tapped the cords, facing Angela.

 

“My throat is blocked and I cannot breathe.” She waited for him, still and unblinking. “I am being held under a pillow or sheet, but I cannot find hands to pull off me.” Her eye followed his hand down his chest. “Here.” He stroked the plating from his heart to where it sheltered beneath the countertop flowers. “Hanzo ripping me. And he feels cold but there is someone sharp and hot too. It’s their chopsticks,” he laughed for her. When she only stared, his eyes rolled to one side. “My body falls apart. People are staring at me, and I cannot escape them.” He stopped there, folding his hand under the counter where she could not see, touching his fingers together in a mudra over his knee. “Is it fixed now?”

 

“You did not have episodes like this when I first woke you.” Angela pinned the curl of her fingers along her jawline, narrowing her eye at the harmless countertop pattern. “Aside from the incident with the fusion of your right arm prosthetic, and that was early model.”

 

“Mm well I would not want to embarrass you in front of the other doctors!” he excused with a grin.

 

“You were hiding it?” Her throat tightened, the words turned painful-- hardly his intended effect. He shook his head stiffly.

 

“N-no, that was a joke. ‘Ha ha’,” he explained. Angela did not make a sound. She pierced him with her acute blue eye. “It began after my first mission. Do you know? Jesse wanted me to cut the power to Hanamura.” He swallowed, thinking aloud, “There is a hospital in Hanamura too.” Balancing his elbow point on the table, he settled his cheek in his hand. “My father was there sometimes.”

 

“I should not have allowed him to take you,” Angela hissed. “He took you too early. But it should not have happened at all.” Genji studied the distress on her face, found himself smiling as a counter, and curled his little finger in against the curve of his mouth, feeling the programmed dimple.

 

“You are trying your best to help Genji now.” Zenyatta graced the conversation again, array in tranquil teal. Angela smiled at him, after so long sniffling before Genji. She nodded, eye glossy.

 

“I am,” she agreed. “I am trying so very hard.” She ducked her head to him. Genji felt his smile evaporating from under his fingertip as he looked between them.

 

“Angela, did Zen--” She interrupted him with a sharp look.

 

“There is no switch I can turn to take away what has been done to you.” Her brow knit. “Do you feel constantly under threat, helpless, or in pain?”

 

“What?” he squawked. “No!”

 

“It is just ‘moments’? You do not experience any continuous images or sounds?”

 

“I am not weak,” he growled.

 

“Your weakness was not in question. You are very strong,” she praised, with a trace of impatience. “Answer me.”

 

“Yes, just moments like you say.”

 

“I need consultants. Discrete ones.” Angela thought aloud as she rocked her gasp of weight back and forth on the stool. She chatted to herself, frowning: “It can’t be helped.” Her eye flashed up to him. “Can you consent to examination by outside parties? With their analysis, I can adjust your processor ministration and potentially reduce the severity of episodes.”

 

“The endocrine,” he groaned. Angela pursed her lips. Genji rubbed the back of his skull, shaking his head. “Is it still me if you mess with that?” His shoulders tightened. “Dulls the blade.”

 

“You are thinking about it the wrong way.” She searched the air, reviewing her memory. Codices and conduct guides. “A trauma state which interferes with your life processes, that is the aberrant condition. Proper use of medicine is what allows you to live unimpeded, naturally.”

 

He issued a wordless affirming grunt. Angela exhaled through her nose. “Please think about it. I cannot do that part on my own. Even in Overwatch, it was never just me. You remember the observers for your procedures? They all had a hand in--”

 

“I don’t want to talk about them,” Genji vowed with silken cold. He hefted his shoulders. “I will do whatever you want me to.” Her lips thinned, token lifts at the corners as she nodded.

 

“Alright. It will be over before you know it, and I believe you will feel much better.”

 

“Angela.” He pointed at the bandage claiming her eye.

 

“Oh, don’t worry. I just didn’t want to waste the supplies. I can take it off tomorrow. I will be able to see for your procedure!” She laughed at last, and the skeleton grip on her face melted away.

 

* * *

 

Genji knotted up on a padded paisley armchair, half-lidded eyes fixed on his knee guards. Industrial _whumps_ padded to the consultation room door, microvibrations shimmying up the chair legs. A three-meter machine ducked through the doorway, delicate silver manipulators sliding into the palm of a flat three-fingered hand as it separated from the lever. The omnic crashed up to him on legs bent twice like a goat’s, foot pedals boasting two forward toes and one back. The head was an irregular trapezoid with a vertical orange bar at the center, silver vents whooshing air out of the cheeks. Heavily armored, boxy Bastion-like carapace in pastel pink, but the underlying connectors and bones were the same matte black as Genji’s own.

 

“Can I help you?” Genji asked in his heaviest slang Japanese, synth gravelly.

 

“I was told I had the last consult of the day,” the omnic rumbled back in perfect linguistic match, an imperial drum to his words. He squatted on his double-bent legs, and his orange indicator leveled with Genji’s face in the armchair. His unarmored right arm, construction yellow and seemingly retrofitted, extruded a few silver spine-fingers to activate a storage compartment atop his bulky thigh. He popped a water bottle from the neon blue chill and held it out. Genji eyed the bottle, took it after a while, and ripped off the cap so he could sip.

 

“Thanks.”

 

“My designation is Dr. Oberon. I am committed to your sexual health.”

 

Cold water threatened to spike up Genji’s nose. He swallowed laboriously, and his mind wandered to questions of why Angela would even keep that anatomy. “Patients sometimes react with alarm at this information. I would like to assure you that I am accredited in several fields including andrology, neurology, sexual psychotherapy, and electrical engineering. May I proceed?”

 

“Are you a professor here?”

 

“Negative. I am a colleague of Dr. Ziegler. She authorized me to disclose our personal history to assure you: that is, she once showed me mercy, and as a result we have become lifelong friends.” His synth warbled lovingly, and his trapezoid head tilted one-sided like a dog’s. “I was eventually able to refer her to a therapist with whom she reports high satisfaction.” A prickle stung across Genji’s cheeks.

 

“Angela has a therapist like you?” was his first question, and Oberon responded with a slow pulse of his hellfire light. “If you are her friend, why would you not be her therapist?”

 

“It seems obvious, does it not? That we should extend the compassion that led us to being doctors to our friends and family. But in practice, the best medicine comes from a detached point of view. Emotions can cloud decision-making.”

 

“Zenyatta says there is a way to feel emotion without letting it consume you.”

 

“Is that a friend of yours? You have abandoned your defensive posture.” Genji looked down his front: he was sitting on the chair like a person, instead of an animal. “Perhaps there are exceptions. You and Dr. Ziegler, for example. Seems she knew the best approach to making contact.” Dr. Oberon chuffed out of his vents in humor. “Did the previous consultation meetings make you uncomfortable?”

 

“They poked me a lot.”

 

“Those monsters,” the omnic whistled, with a glance to the sterling medical table a meter off Genji’s cushy chair. “I will not poke you with anything. Some of my questions may be repeats from your general psychiatric evaluation, please be patient and answer them thoroughly.”

 

* * *

 

_I did not want to._

_Did you feel pressured by something that was said, or were you were physically forced into participating?_

_I mean I did it to make my brother angry._

_What time did this occur?_

_Two days before we fought._

_It was your last sexual contact prior to the incorporation of your prosthetics?_

_Yes._

_He was drunk. I don’t think it counts._

_Were you also drunk?_

_I am not capable._

_Then what do you mean “intimate contact”? That is sex._

_Hugging, non-sexual contact while sleeping, holding a touch on an arm or leg--_

_Yes._

_How frequently?_

_Every day._

_How do you feel about marriage?_

_So soon? We just met today._

_Very funny, a classic deflection._

_Marriage is to make an heir. So to me, it is like getting drunk._

 

_Your friend is a member of the Shambali religious order?_

_Yes._

_Do you have strong beliefs regarding the Shambali faith or any other religion?_

_I don’t know. I am not able to see like he does yet. He says the world is beautiful, but I think he is the one that makes it so. If he left, everything would go with him._

 

* * *

 

He clutched the water bottle, warmed now to room temperature, and suckled another drink from it. Dr. Oberon peeled a tablet from his storage and held it out. A hologram blossomed from the surface when Genji made contact: rows upon rows of prosthetic penis thumbnails. Genji shook valiantly in a containment effort, and then a cackle squeaked out of his rebel synthesizer.

 

“Humorous,” Oberon droned. “I can wait.”

 

Genji calmed down as he tapped individual holograms and they maximized for inspection, flaccid at first, erect when he spun the image. “The foundation principle of reconstruction is to take the genetic base and apply a standard nutrition schedule to it. But in practice, it was quickly discovered that patients have a different idea of what they looked like compared to the printer render. So additional features can be defined using this catalog.”

 

“How many centimeters can it be?”

 

“I will insist we start from the genetic base.” Genji quirked his lips. “After your comfort level has been determined, additional fittings may be purchased to suit your needs.” Oberon’s bar light panned back and forth across Genji’s face. “What else?”

 

“Look.” Genji pointed at his crotch, holding his knees open. “There is no room.”

 

“You do not find clothing agreeable?”

 

Genji crossed his arms. Oberon reached a flat finger toward the tablet, and the thumbnails changed. When Genji opened a model, it resembled a translucent leaf. He turned the image, and the phallus slid out like a knife.

 

“A ninja!” he gasped.

 

“It is the omnic type.”

 

Genji furrowed his brow.

 

“What else does it do?”

 

“Some additional functionality exists during machine intercourse, but it is perfectly capable of safe penetration with humans,” Oberon hummed. “Texture is spontaneously modifiable.” Genji leaned against the armrest, lips pressed together in a slant while he flipped the hologram in circles. “Color is spontaneously mod--”

 

“Yes, I want this one!”

 

He turned the virtual catalog pages until he found the corresponding openings. He ran his finger around the image of one, a conservative teardrop with a gap that could be wrought open in the center.

 

“It is only an approximation of humanity,” Oberon said. Genji tapped his cheek. “Why do you touch your face?”

 

“That is something Zen said,” he replied. “Are all of you built this way?”

 

“Most omniums only began incorporating these features towards the end of the Crisis.”

 

The ghost of laughter stationed in his lower torso evaporated. Genji pulled his hand away from the catalog.

 

“To attack people?”

 

“There was no such programming included,” Oberon stated in a firm, deep broadcast. He held up three tab-like fingers in caution. “Current scholarship suggests the opposite: a defense mechanism, to assist humans in empathizing with machines, enhancing our long-term compatibility. The omniums may have thought humankind would never view us as more than objects if we could not engage in multi-dimensional relationships with them, and meet their physical requirements.”

 

“But that is sad.” Genji adjusted his hand back over the rows of hologram entry points briefly, only to retreat into his chair cushion and look away.

 

“We do not choose our parents,” Oberon soothed. “And we cannot ask the omniums about their dreams anymore. Do you want to know something interesting?” Genji flicked a glance at him. “Most pre-Crisis units choose to retrofit, even if their only relationships are with other machines. And the Shambali have assisted greatly: in countries where inter-marriage is legal, 99% ask for a Shambali practitioner to official the wedding.” Genji smiled, and Oberon’s signal dimmed in friendly agreement.

 

“So, which kind is male and which is female?” Genji opened a couple example structures side-by-side.

 

“Sexually dimorphic features did not occur before the post-Crisis dismantling. The designs applied equally in all omnium constructions. Those identifying as female may choose to detach the phallus.” Dr. Oberon unfurled his legs, towering over the armchair in a pastel anvil pillar. “Take the catalog with you. I will request a second consultation in 48 hours’ time.”

 

“That is what all the other doctors did,” Genji moaned.

 

* * *

 

The pegs on his feet stamped neon reflections up the rainy street as he fled. A long scarlet kite tail with several eyes on its head dropped its steering paddles and slowed in the sky to watch him, _OSEC0239_ blipping across his contact list. When the drone finally streamed away from Genji’s position, its body disappeared in frames of hologram camouflage. Genji slammed his palm on the locked door panel of the residential wing, shouted his name at it. All the lights on his body blazed, his presence a rippling green beacon in the violet sunset. There were not even any clouds over Oasis to go with the daily scheduled rain.

 

He slapped another panel outside the guest faculty suite and swept inside, through the dark, empty living room to the bedroom. A flying leap positioned him on the mattress, where he could inchworm under the comforter and lie inert. Almost inert. His hand snuck out and grabbed his helmet from the bedside table.

 

Zenyatta relaxed out of meditation by the open window and turned to the bed, water spots drying to ring stains on his hull. Genji could smell more rain invoking the wool and cotton in the Shambali’s trousers. Zenyatta approached the hill of Genji’s rear beneath the comforter, caught himself before he addressed it, and drifted around to the opening that had swallowed the white helmet. He leaned forward and peered in at the seething green visor.

 

“Have you been cleared for your procedures?”

 

The visor light dulled. A white-black hand stuck out of the shadow, and flipped a victory sign. “Wonderful,” Zenyatta sighed. He covered Genji’s wilting fingers with his hand, and set a couple pieces of numbered plastic on the bedsheet by the comforter opening. Pocket holograms of a lacey gothic arena and a woman in an embroidered black dress sprang from the surfaces. “I am to tell you these tickets are a reward for your patience through the examinations, from Dr. Ziegler.” The visor peeked up higher through the opening at Zen.

 

He turned over on his back, taking one of the tickets and holding it above his visor as he protruded from the comforter halo. “She said formal attire is required, and shared a sum of money,” Zenyatta continued. “When you are prepared to emerge…” He held up one silver finger. “The process of discovery begins.” Genji spun the hologram, the woman’s crow wing sleeves flapping around her wrists. He stretched his arms, hands dangling off the flank of the mattress. He tipped his head back.

 

“That could be fun.”

 

Zenyatta’s blue lights twinkled a smile above him. Sometimes, in the consultation rooms or on the exam tables, it was easy to forget where he was.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter:** Say your goodbyes.
>   * I overwrote this chapter to the tune of about 15,000 words, so I have split it in two to spare people's browsers. The next part will be posted Very Soon(tm). It's a bit longer than this one, and contains slightly fewer holographic dongs.
>   * _obturator:_ the tip of a cannula tube used for inserting instruments through the abdominal wall during surgery, may be bladed or unsharpened
>   * Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012) was an Italian Senator and a Nobel laureate for her work in neuroscience.
>   * _cardamom:_ plant native to southern Asian countries, the seeds of which can be processed into an expensive spice; in the Himalayas the local cardamom is black, whereas in other locations it is green, and the different species have different spice properties
>   * _Camellia:_ genus of plants, the leaves of which are processed to create tea
>   * _dhoti:_ this is the red band and cloth Zenyatta wears over his pants, it is a traditional garment typically worn in Nepal, India, and other countries in south Asia
>   * The reason liquid can come out your nose when you laugh (people cite milk but that is mostly because the victims of this anatomical trick are usually children) is because your soft palate does not correctly block the route to your nasal passages if you are eating and breathing-- laughing requires you to exhale --at the same time.
> 



	15. The Dream Called OASIS (II)

 

They admired the snarling freeway, and stopped to watch a full cycle of the bullet train streaming diamond across the water. Even before the sun was all the way gone, lesser stars dusted the sky in oily, gleaming rivers of milk. Zenyatta took his hand and showed him another piece of the campus: a huge one-way window to a lecture hall with fifty empty seats and a projection screen as tall as a house. He said earlier it had been filled with young humans learning, and that he had stayed a long time observing the lecture. Genji simmered in brief jealousy for a day that did not consist of being examined and interrogated.

 

Zenyatta described the material of the lecture, the rise and fall of Horizon Lunar Colony, lifting his hands in exuberant sweeps, making diagrams with his etched spheres, and the doubt in Genji’s stomach departed. He mentioned he knew one of the apes involved, and Zenyatta became very still. The monk leaned forward, every angle keen and his lights very bright, and eventually Genji realized it was his turn to tell a story.

 

“He was always kind to me,” he finished. Some of Zenyatta’s insatiable youth left the sit of his body as Genji talked, but he nodded at the ending. They walked out to the adjacent plaza, sunset grazing them between colosseum leaves of plasmetal. All the students had gone missing; the only passersby were bulbous archival drones with scanning eyes. Zenyatta said he smelled the wet bark of the palms and the porous stonework of the flame-shaped archways. He invited Genji to breathe deeply.

 

Genji smelled molten sugar candy.

 

He pursued the saccharine trail to a glass elevator beneath the freeway. The walls jittered in a parting rumble of the flying apocalypse as they sank away. Waterfall summits framed their new world. Barriers erected over a basin park prevented the most intense clouding, and mist crossed the air in shimmering curves overhead, following the invisible dome surfaces. Enough fog was left for mystery. Genji picked out a few hoops of metal and towers of colorful fabric glinting in the heart of the park. When the elevator doors spread open, Zenyatta pointed out a winged outline to the west: the concert hall.

 

The candy smell was closer than that.

 

Along the white promenade outside the elevator, shops blanketed the freeway support wall behind panes of gently electrified glass. Floating rings lit up the path to the concert as the sky burnt red, and the shops activated colorful Arabic sinews in circles and animal shapes. A calligraphy peacock framed by tuxedo and dress displays fanned a neon doorframe in the glass with his tail. Genji led Zenyatta over.

 

Zenyatta hesitated outside the closed access, studying the headless, white-bodied figurines in the display. He touched one of the peacock’s feathers, which illuminated green. “Credit verified,” an electronic voice chimed in Japanese, and the door opened wide.

 

Whitewood panels artificially choked the atrium. They passed through a curving, pointy-tipped archway, miniature orange poplars encased in alcoves to either side. The shop’s centerpiece was a raised black pool filled with water lilies. Glass walls sectioned the paths spoking out from the pool, surfaces embedded with dried flowers, postcard-sized holograms of worldly locations, and flattened omnic carapaces with the wiring delicately peeled out into anatomic illustrations. Exposed wooden beams radiated over their heads, effecting unfinished palace interiors and old, holy corridors. Arabesques illuminated the far walls in heavy granite panels, interspersed with industrial black or softly glowing white swatches of paint.

 

Genji gazed into an artificial skylight writing a perfect white circle over the centermost lilies. A sense of Nepal, though no concrete memory, glided through his gut. He spotted the blazer racks beyond, while Zenyatta stopped to examine an integration of flowers with one of the omnic wiring diagrams in the walls. They separated, Genji darting off to the suit coats standing above floor carvings of yellow roses and their endless spiraling vines.

 

He had a couple blazers hooked over his back-- leveraging the magnetic tethers currently empty of swords --when he realized Zenyatta had never joined him. The search effort ended among the women’s gowns, one of his late guesses along with lingerie and shoes. Zenyatta sat in an alcove of blue-green marble, walls painted in thick swirls of honey light. The monk watched two mannequins in gowns, each piece based in sheer black fabric.

 

On the left mannequin, the gown was absent a sleeve, the other shoulder ending quickly in crochet panels of turquoise, purple, and white. Flower embroidery slanted a belt across the abdomen, and the collar line fanned out complementary bead-like accents in a royal necklace of cloth. A bundle of down feathers hung in a tassel from the tip of the tulip skirt petal.

 

The right gown danced in a split abaya of translucent, multi-colored silk. Black fish stripe borders, weaving and melting, divided the abaya shades. The central dress cut lower on the chest, bloomed into flowers like its counterpart. But the designs were less symbol and more realism, growing up from the fringe of the slanted pencil skirt. A sign below the display offered a couple lines of Arabic, and as Genji puzzled the text over, it morphed to kanji and kana: _the classics never go out of style ~ taking inspiration from the early century designs of hana sadiq._ He set the blazers on a bench, and Zenyatta did not turn around. In fact the monk snuck his hand toward the trailing edge of the right gown’s sleeve.

 

Genji sidled up behind him, and throbbed in his deepest voice:

 

“You want to try it on?”

 

Zenyatta’s hands straightened level with his shoulders, his face snapped to Genji. Genji glared back, intense enough to see his green bar stamped across the silver plate. He snickered. Zenyatta dropped his hands over his tattered knees, pinching thumbs and ringfingers together. Genji squeezed his shoulders. A faceless golden attendant whisked out of the walls to them, surely drawn by radar for the words _try it on._ The attendant shared a model with the Shambali engineer, but he wore a shiny ochre robe to his ankles, layers of silks filling the part at his collar. He waited beside them, listening carefully. “Which one?” Genji pressed.

 

Zenyatta lifted his head at the striped abaya. “Okay,” Genji purred. “I will try the other.” He clicked the left side of his visor frame dark. Zenyatta looked at him, and chimed with laughter.

 

After taking them to a dressing suite and having Zenyatta remove his clothing, the attendant spent a while scanning Zen’s shell. Zenyatta looked to Genji, who shrugged. The attendant backed away slowly, opened a shelf from the wall, and retrieved a couple steel-wire sponges. Genji flinched as the first sponge came down on Zenyatta’s water stains, char, and phantoms of dust -- maybe some from the American desert still? The falling specks were red. Squeaks of metal-on-metal rang through the air.

 

Zenyatta’s synthesizer rattled a high pitch--

 

\--and slid into a luxurious sigh. “Really?” Genji sniffed. The attendant performed a spot check, and wordlessly helped Zenyatta into the gown. “You have to put your feet down or everyone can see up your skirt,” Genji reviewed. The attendant provided his shoulder, and Zenyatta held it as though on his way down a steep hill, planting his feet on top of the circular velvet dressing pedestal. He stretched out his arms at the other omnic’s request, prismatic silk fanning from his elbows while the attendant molded the nanofibers onto his frame. Genji crossed his arms behind his head, whistling.

 

The attendant came to him, and the second sponge emerged. “The doctors cleaned me. I’m clean. Please, thank you.” The gold omnic ignored his protests. Zenyatta watched him from the pedestal, a gaze Genji read as a question. “I do not feel it. Not yet,” he noted. “I-- ah!” The attendant dug at the back of his knee. Zenyatta chuckled. As the attendant circled around front, Genji noticed a model number tattooed in luminescent turquoise on the back of his head. He brought over the black flower dress.

 

Genji huffed as the top stuck around his chest. The attendant loosened it, and pinched the right side of the skirt to expose his red-gray leg. Zenyatta blurted an _oh_ , and Genji found him tilting his head at the same thigh he had seen every day for years.

 

“I did not realize covering parts of it made it more handsome,” he said.

 

“Of course you know that,” Genji buzzed, framing his hand at the back of his neck plates, lifting his elbow high. The attendant pulled his arm down. “These are the kinds of things Shambali wear all the time. If Mondatta wore twenty colors instead of just white and off-white…” He dared point at Zenyatta’s outfit when he thought the attendant was not looking. “He would be a butterfly?” Zenyatta raised his arm, looking at the sleeve radiating from his elbow.

 

“And, did you choose to be a flower?” he asked, lowering his hand to cup the bundled feathers at the corner of Genji’s skirt. Genji’s visor flickered.

 

“If I can be the snapping kind.” He made pointy jaws with his fingers and worked them open and shut. “I wanted to make sure you were not embarrassed, up here without a friend. I realize now I am being ridiculous. You are Zenyatta. Nothing ever bothers you.” Zenyatta’s lights paled. Genji bent closer to the monk’s abruptly downturned face. “So did you dress like him in the past?” The old clothing pile sat dirty yellow by the wall, past Zenyatta’s shoulder. Among the drab folds lay traces of creamy hexagonal pattern. Genji clutched clumsily at the hip of the abaya. “Silky stuff with pretty wings.”

 

“It does sound beautiful when you describe it, my dear Genji.” Zenyatta ran his hands down the front of his gown, soothing the honeywort and bleeding hearts creeping up him from the bottom edge.

 

“Not bad for a baldie anyway,” Genji snorted. In a fluid twist of his shimmering shoulders and neck, Zenyatta considered his naked head in one of the mirrors surrounding the pedestal. He raised his arm, lumping the sleeve forward so it obscured his hand, and touched the back of his wrist to his golden jaw liner. The sleeve hung in a rainbow cone from his face.

 

“It is a beard,” he said from behind his arm. Genji grabbed his shoulders and pulled him into an embrace.

 

“I love you!” he laughed loudly. Zenyatta raised his eye slots over the bunched trap of the hug.

 

“And I you.”

 

The bars of his tender arm collected around Genji’s back.

 

“Gentlemen.” The attendant. “Will these be your purchases for the evening?”

 

“Ah…” Genji looked past his captive monk at the crochet flourishes of his dress. “Give me a minute?”

 

“Please do not leave the premises.”

 

“Okay!” He released Zenyatta and retrieved the blazers he had left out by the mannequin stand. As he returned, Zenyatta tracked the loud ties flapping on the hangers. “Zen,” Genji teased, waving one coat alluringly. “You would have been fun to shop with when I was younger.”

 

When they were dressed again, Genji framed a couple ties over his white shirt, and selected the blue one with orange tiger irises. The attendant stroked the intelligent fiber knees of his silvery gray trousers, creating a part to breathe out the spikes of his shin guards. Genji looked over at Zenyatta, who was trying to figure out how to do a bowtie. “Hold on,” he warned, stepping around the attendant to take the tie, laying it aside. Zenyatta stood still as Genji fumbled for the top button of his dragon green shirt. Genji ticked the side of his fingertips futilely along the delicate button rim before releasing it. “Soon,” he muttered to himself, and leveled a more instructional tone at the monk: “Undo the top two.”

 

Zenyatta’s fingers made intricate, sparkling work of the top pair of buttons. Genji used more provisional strokes to smooth the part of the collar, and retrieved a couple magnetic stays to rest below the sharp fold. Zenyatta’s synth inhaled. “Does it tickle?” He stepped back for a less fisheyed view. “Now you are sexy.” Zenyatta looked down at the elegant tuck of the shirt beneath a braided cloth belt with a handful of dyes. He shrugged on his ebony coat.

 

“I will get lots of dates,” he concluded, buttoning the front of the coat.

 

“Just the middle one,” Genji cautioned. “Yeah you will.”

 

The attendant fastened Genji’s tie after Genji explained the sensitivity issue, and smoothed a golden scarf around his neck, folding the tails down the front of his coat. A “might I suggest” led to a ring of beads around Genji’s left wrist. Zenyatta ended up with a watch band on his right. He looked at it after they checked out.

 

“Patience is a virtue, but the concert may not wait patiently for us,” he admitted.

 

“How did he talk you into that?” Genji scoffed. Zenyatta peeked up from the posed angle of his wrist.

 

“He said this too is sexy,” he said, deepening his voice around the last word.

 

“I live in a blessed time,” Genji whispered to himself. Zenyatta’s old clothing nested safely within a tan carry-bag swinging from his hand as they exited the shop, and his ribbon kicked to life in the breeze off the falls. The glint of Zen’s watch kept catching his eye as they walked toward the winged outline of the concert hall. He raised his face to the misty sky, ripe with sketches of stars.

 

A streamers’ collective filled the wall to their left. The center frame was a splitscreen of the Talon Organization’s symbol and a blurry photo of the blue woman. Footage of police officers cordoning sections of the hospital wreckage played. Genji’s visor dimmed. “It is a dream, right?” He flattened his hand over the collar of his shirt, dragging his fingers down the hard edges of his armor just under the silk.

 

“Do you have many dreams like this?”

 

“Not at all.” He could smell the sugar again, powerful like a nectar stirred into the mist. He stopped, and looked across the street to a festival blossoming in the basin park. The entryway was marked by a fountain, but just past it: a cotton candy stand. Genji sniffed. Zenyatta turned to him, marking the air with oddly concrete clicks of his sandals. The monk’s hands rested in his trouser pockets.

 

One of the cars zooming up the street caught them close together in its headlights, and the driver hung on the horn as the vehicle flew by. Genji’s helmet dipped, rose, and he held out his open palm. “Could I have the tickets?” Zenyatta raised his hand and the tickets were already tweezed between his fingers. He pressed them into Genji’s palm, and folded Genji’s fingers over the top. Genji switched the tickets under the band of the carry-bag, freeing himself to take Zenyatta by his wrist.

 

He took a step toward the plasmetal street surface. Another car reared around the nearest corner and shot past him fast enough that Zenyatta had to help him adjust his tie. “Shit!” he yelled after the red taillights. Securing his hold on Zenyatta, he tried for the festival again at a run, sticking to the white bars of the crosswalk. On the other side of the street, he lifted his arm around Zenyatta’s shoulders, sagging against him in a bodily sigh.

 

The fountain had a thousand dove statues flourishing above the spouts in varying stages of take-off. Lights at the top haloed the circular park entry with intersections of wing shapes. Two women perched on the fountain rim, legs crossed, heels ticking the air, keenly watching the two machines that tempted death to reach the festival. Both wore blue knee-length kaftans, faces sparkling with eyeshadows and jewelry. They did not look away when Genji gathered himself and raised his visor their way. Genji unhitched the tickets from under his bag loop, walked over, and stuck out his hand full of possibilities.

 

The women conversed in Arabic. Zenyatta answered. A stenciled brow arched away from gold painted in wisps around one set of eyes.

 

“Are you asking us on a date, Mr. Robot?” she chided in English.

 

“Did you just buy those clothes?” asked the other, from violet lips that blew off perfumed smoke. She adjusted a long cigarette holder in her hand. “The one on the right is cute,” she shared, ostensibly with her friend, but her choice of language left no mysteries. Genji elbowed Zenyatta’s side. The smoking woman pushed the round of her shoulder up in a lazy lean toward the disguised restroom hut right of the plaza. “Are those two ever getting out of the bathroom? They took the beer with them.” One corner of her mouth lifted at Genji.

 

“These robots only have two tickets,” the other declared. “I thought robots were good at counting!”

 

“You can take them,” Genji said. “I decided I did not feel like sitting down tonight.” The fancy cigarette holder made circles in the air as a phone came out. When held beside to the tickets, the phone displayed a hologram of the concert hall, the ticketed seats lighting up in orange.

 

“Are you sure?” the smoker grunted, all suave and silver evaporated from her throat. “These are really good seats.”

 

Genji looked to Zenyatta, who nodded.

 

“Okay!” Genji tipped a thumb up above his bag strap. The women went flat-faced at each other. They seized the tickets and pulled off their heels so they could run down the sidewalk.

 

“If those guys ever come out of the bathroom, tell them you kidnapped us to start another Crisis!”

 

“Yes, we are very important ladies! Prime robot kidnap targets!”

 

They escaped in a sprint of rippling cloth, giggling about the foolishness of machines.

 

“Do you think they confused us with drones?” Genji wondered. “Or maybe omnic clerks are the only ones they know.” They both turned to the train of glass storefronts filled primarily with human customers and ritzy-looking robotic attendants. He supposed Oberon counted outside that sphere, but he never asked the doctor where he came from originally.

 

He had never asked Zenyatta, either.

 

His visor turned to the monk, then up at the arch of tree canopies framing the plaza. Pivoting his weight around on his heel, he investigated the rest of the branches knitting high above the festival tents.

 

“What are you searching for?” Zenyatta’s voice occupied the center of his head, underneath his helmet, warm and strong, a cup of shochu in his hands that he could not drink.

 

“Cherry blossoms,” he declared loudly after a moment. “That was the best excuse for a festival in Hanamura. I think it was my grandmother who said no one can grow the trees that bloom all year in the village. That way it is not annoying and pink all the time! But then they can have the festival too, catch the tourist yen.” He raked cat claws against the air. “I just remembered…I always thought they were more beautiful because they did not stay.”

 

“You are like the man who came to the monastery,” Zenyatta suggested. Genji shook his head, visor darkening a deeper green. “What do you interpret as the meaning of the celebration around us?”

 

“I think the concert is down the street, and they want everyone to stop by afterwards. Get drunk and spend too much money on games, probably.”

 

Two young men in blue button-downs and white bellbottoms stumbled out of the restroom, one with a beer stain damping his pants, the rest of a six-pack hanging off his loose knuckles. The other man jabbed furiously at his phone. As they questioned the emptied fountain plaza, Genji’s attention moved up and down their black hair and the lean of one man on the other’s shoulder. He did not notice Zenyatta’s answer to the pair of them until the English words _Omnic Crisis_ stuck out at the end. Six-pack’s face dropped, and he shouted a demand that turned Zenyatta’s array bright. The texter switched down his contact list and rapidly thumbed an inquiry while the first man stomped up to them.

 

“No Zen!” Genji laughed, taking the omnic’s arm. “Did you really tell him what that girl said to?!” Zenyatta’s face turned slowly, expressionlessly to him. The texter nosed up from his phone to yell a clarification to the scenario that went unheard.

 

The approaching man tossed down his cluster of beers and the cans exploded all over the limestone brick, frothing rings around the fountain base. Genji was first out of freezing, clasping Zenyatta’s wrist. “Run!” He stumbled over a green pillbug-shaped drone that emerged from the grass to hoover up the spilt beer, and shouted apology.

 

Striped cart colors pulsed down their sides. The sugar heartbeat of the cotton candy stand whizzed away, and cinnamon and mint and mist speckled the air, water never quite condensing on his visor. Kiddie pools for hologram fish scoops reflected moving veins of light up their exposed metal. Electronic fireflies swirled to life on breezes between the tent channels, shined in double helices up palm tree trunks. Balloons snapped under dart-tips. Genji ran as fast from the rapid pops as he did from the jilted date they had already left far behind.

 

In the act of following him, Zenyatta stumbled away from the earth, kite in a low wind. His carved spheres fell out of orbit into a duckling line. He wrapped his hand into a fist as Genji kept tugging on his arm. Neon lights exploded across a dance stage ahead, flushing rainbows through a hundred bodies, and briefly, two escaping silhouettes. Genji crushed the corner of a rose garden wall under his hand and whipped around to the back of it, where clover and yellow ivy flowers grew. Zenyatta’s sandal toes swayed just off the ground as they stopped running.

 

“Come here,” Genji gasped, reeling in the weightless body of the monk. The carry-bag dropped to the ground. A lute tune spun out over a drum line on the other side of the wall, and the solo gave way to slow, deliberate reverberations of a keyboard synthesizer. He turned with Zenyatta anchored in his arms. “I think it is like this,” he murmured, roughing through another few circular steps in time with the wall of music.

 

Zenyatta simulated a breathless laugh and descended closer. His legs swayed around Genji’s. Genji checked their footwork: Zenyatta’s toes flirted with the blades of park grass, drawing temporary disturbance lines around the stomps of Genji’s feet. He gazed up, and Zenyatta’s face was just above, lights glowing down upon him. Genji slumped his hard faceplate against the exposed web of iron collarbone.

 

“I like seeing your eyes,” Zenyatta said. Genji extracted from his indulgence, peeked at the watching slots, and twisted more slowly. The park did not spare any of the bite-sized lights for the area past the wall, just a few haunting the black octopus heads of nearby palms. Just Zenyatta’s blue moved through the grass, and his own neon shining through where the suit fabric clutched smartly to his shoulders. His visor pulsed to life, his white hands coiled into the ebony jacket back.

 

“Thank you.”

 

“Did you never dance before?”

 

“Not this polite movie stuff. You?”

 

Zenyatta rested his wrists over Genji’s shoulders. When he tipped his head skyward, the night colored him, all the darkness and the tiny hopes of stars. The omnic spheres drawn around their bodies loosened, floating golden phantasms lighting to every side. The mala flowed through rapid ellipses, mobile surfaces clinking as the monk drew them up short, humming as he relaxed them out in a solar circle. Their energy clicked out of view, and resurged gleaming purple as they bent in a cluster to each cardinal point. Genji recalled the color from the fields of Nepal, and reached for one of the darklights, but Zenyatta spun them out again colorlessly, trails of arms etched in a halo to bear them away.

 

Genji looked down: the monk’s physical arms, dull silver with blots of red cable, remained wired over his shoulders. The others behind Zenyatta he could not see anymore. But as he embraced the monk, he thought many hands replied to the two he clawed desperately across the flats of Zenyatta’s shoulders. He thought warm fingertips lined his spine, cradled the back of his helmet, caught his ribbon as he lifted his forehead to meet the monk’s.

 

In the arms of Zenyatta, he saw the return of the violet incandescence, but had no further need to grope his way to it. The mala turned, the monk “danced” with him, and Genji exhaled all lingering impressions of the day. He fed the video and audio of the key moments, the things that set him to huddling in the consult chair. It was not sympathy-seeking but demonstration, making an example of his ability to identify the threats, and release them to the divine. “I do miss our meditations though,” he murmured, visor feed off as he listened to the clipped metal rings of the shifting orbs.

 

“We can now.”

 

“Oh yeah?” he heard his own synth, rumbling louder for the lack of visual stimulus to distract him from it. Dark, playful. So self-confident it had to belong to someone else. “You want to go down and get to it right here?” Zenyatta only nodded. Genji could read the familiar twinge of moving parts over the music next door and the twinkling of spheres. “I would love to get you down in the grass and conduct some serious soul-searching,” he prompted again, to see if he could catch the omnic on this time.

 

“Good. Let us begin.” Dead calm. Genji sank his face against the omnic’s neck. “Open your eyes, Genji.” He looked up. Zenyatta’s array was rich blue with humor, and he waggled a couple spheres he had stilled out of the dance. To make sure Genji understood, he poked the smiley corner of his jaw liner with a golden finger. Genji crushed his hands into fists on Zenyatta’s back. A thread snap somewhere rang through his head.

 

“I have a dream sometimes where you came to me after Hanzo instead of the organization.”

 

“What do I do?”

 

“I think you let me die,” Genji reported pleasantly. He shook his head. “But it does not hurt. It is peaceful. Also for some reason I still look like this in the dream.” He clunked his fingers on his faceplate, synth hinting laughter.

 

“I would rather have you as part of my life,” Zenyatta chuckled in reply. “We have so much to experience together.” He withdrew his arm-- one of the plain ones --and folded his fingers on Genji’s shoulder. Genji found himself nodding. His shoulders bunched, but Zenyatta’s hand remained fixed till he calmed.

 

“You know I would do anything you ask,” he heard himself utter again, less steady this time. “Anything you wanted?” Zenyatta processed in silence as Genji gazed up at him.

 

“Would you abandon your revenge upon your brother?”

 

Genji ducked his visor, hands wilting from Zenyatta’s shoulderblades. Zenyatta followed the cowering with an interested cant of his head. Genji slung his arms back around that skinny black-green figure, loosely, and tucked his chin over Zen’s shoulder.

 

“That isn’t fair,” he said softly. “Not after everything he is responsible for. When my body will not work, when Angela is injured.” He swallowed. “When people are killed-- it is his fault. Like my dream, the paths change… None of it would have happened that way.”

 

“The happiness you feel right now, he is responsible?”

 

Genji shuddered, fixing his visor on the swells of trees across the closed trails behind Zenyatta. Tall, dark, and unseen in the night.

 

“Do not confuse me,” he hissed.

 

“Alright,” Zenyatta’s synth acquiesced, duller than he had ever heard it. Genji let go of the monk, but Zenyatta took his hands. “You will remember that I love you,” the monk added. A command? So tentative. A vision? The Shambali once said the only reason they found the village in Nepal was that Mondatta saw it in his mind first.

 

“How could I forget?” he chided, trying to resurrect his humor. “Your story is tragic.” Zenyatta tipped his head. “You were on the path to enlightenment. A ravenous demon fell upon you, and you said ‘oh, I will keep this’. Are you a fool?” he grated, looming closer. “Or maybe--”

 

“I saw only a man, who was strong and kind.”

 

“Wherever did you get that idea?” Genji tightened his arms on the plating beneath Zenyatta’s clothes, one metal chest locked to the other with only the sheen of silk between them. Zenyatta held his hands on the sides of Genji’s helmet, thumbs following the lines of the wing antennae. “What’s wrong?” Genji prompted. “I’m not worried about the procedures. Angela is very good at them.”

 

“I want you to be free.” Zenyatta’s array dimmed and fluttered. “I want you to make your own decisions, and find harmony in this world.”

 

“Sounds nice.” Genji brushed their faceplates back together. “Sometimes when you speak, I hear how young you are. I hear all the different futures you see in your head. That is what frees me.”

 

* * *

 

“Can you tell me everyone’s name, Genji?” Angela asked.

 

“Dr. Ziegler.” He smiled up at her from the operating slab, lips tight. She pinched her eyes at him in friendly reply, her mouth obscured by a periwinkle surgical mask. Pink rashes and burn-induced crow’s feet clung around her right eye. Between the top of her hair cap and the ceiling hung a huge circular lamp, but it had not been turned on yet. The ceiling tiles broadcast a hologram of the sky, not just open blue atmosphere someone could fall into and drown, but a calculated view past a shady canyon outcrop. Tall ferns propped up the corners of the room. He could still smell plastic melting in one of the kilns by the wall, and the taste of steel from the bedside instruments coated his tongue.

 

Just beyond its image layer, the ceiling was full of slots waiting to pop out other tools. Genji followed the line of the hologram outcrop, and counted grains in the texture of the rock. Eventually he was ready to lower his eyes to the rest of the less cleverly hidden room, and focused on a couple women in dull blue Vishkar uniforms. “Doctors Yuhara and Yuhara,” he grinned. The evaluation psychiatrists, introduced themselves as Kobe natives, though apparently they had moved out of Japan when they were young. They had a funny way of describing that historical episode, _we were moved,_ like shipping cargo. One Yuhara, Ran, had watched his exercise in self-calming with the ceiling hologram and nodded encouragingly. The other barely looked up from her tablet.

 

Standing behind this other Yuhara, Jun, and perhaps more interested in the Vishkar than in Genji, was an elderly man in black horn-rimmed glasses. “Dr. Hassoun.” He had not been part of any consult, but Angela introduced him shortly before getting Genji on the table. “Oberon.” The omnic ticked his light bar green in solidarity. “Covvai.” The anesthesiologist was another procedure site introduction. Another friend of Angela’s, an old bushy-haired woman. The blue and red cables festooning the ports in his back rubbed together as he twisted to look at her. Like Jun, she did not bother looking up from her electronics. Genji moved on: “Al-Zahabi, who is Dr. Hassoun’s shadow.” The young man wiggled his gloved hand, smiling white and warm, a curly black beard lining his thick face.

 

He picked through the rest of the doctors. Angela brought no residents, drones, or onlookers. She said the Yuharas had been requisitioned as extra hands out of necessity, and that as with the psychiatric consultation, any data they gathered for their Corporation would be anonymized. Angela watched a graph on the wall while he spoke. “And Zen is outside,” he finished in a nervous mantra. She looked back down.

 

“Yes, there is a family room just outside. He is waiting for you right there, probably even more anxious than you are.” She pulled a mounted screen from the ceiling and showed the video to Genji: Zenyatta floating on an armchair, sewing up holes in his pants with thread they had scrimped from the clothing store. Angela’s leaned one blue eye out from behind the monitor. “Are you ready to begin?” Genji had not seen her since the day he woke, he did not even know where she was staying, and now he was just going to sleep in front of her again.

 

“Okay,” he breathed rather than saying anything. She tugged on the screen and it retracted to the ceiling. While she exchanged her gloves, she nodded to Covvai. Covvai spun her fingertip above her datapad and pumps whirred around Genji.

 

“It should be easier than it used to be,” Angela said. He blinked at her. “I think technology has caught up with you a little.” She pinched her thumb and forefinger together. “And proper staff is everything, of course.” She raised her chin to Covvai.

 

“Save it,” Covvai snarled. Angela’s gentle smile lingered behind her mask.

 

“If Zen is scared,” Genji croaked, and Angela and Covvai both bent toward him, the other doctors still viewing holograms or making ready. Genji lifted his arm, demonstrating the waggle of the cables threaded into it. “Tell him I am finally a squid too!” Angela’s brow wrinkled. Covvai grabbed his wrist and forced him back to the table. “He will laugh…” Genji insisted.

 

* * *

 

“Though I am not…sure…if he is afraid of anything in this world…”

 

Genji was not sure how long it took, but someone stuffed a cold, wrinkly thumbpad under his eyebrows, tacking up his eyelid. A white light aimed into his eye, he focused on it, and the thumb relented to the other eye. Just as the pressure got unbearable, the hands released him entirely.

 

He rolled onto his side, the back of one hand and the palm of the other fanning across cotton sheets, fingers sinking into the creases between the diamond pattern of the mattress surface beneath. The cyborg fondled the fabric, a twitch wracking him shoulders to legs as someone used his spine exposure to yank a stick covered in string from the rear of his throat. His eyelids fluttered, arm rising for the naked opening, but the sagging crow claw from before caught his hand and laid it down. Then it touched the edge of the chrome armor on the back of his neck, and he recalled how to close the plates tight.

 

The hand traced down his spine, flicking finger pressure out to either side, gathering more squirms from Genji.

 

“Are you coming around?” Ran Yuhara asked. “Lift your left hand if you can hear me.” Genji jerked a couple fingers airborne. “Good,” she praised. “Open your eyes? You do not have your visor on, if that is what you are trying to see with.”

 

“Wait,” growled another voice, and the hand playing with Genji’s spinal column seized his shoulders and flipped him onto his back. “Okay,” Covvai grunted.

 

Genji was touching earth. The whole mattress cradled his back, and when the women around him shifted in their chairs, the air stirred against his forearms and knuckles.

 

“Open your eyes,” Ran asked again. His eyelids stuck together, struggled to relax, and slowly peeled apart. The world was white with zebra lines framing the edges-- his black hair. He went from the airy strands to the outline of a face, and the portrait resolved into Ran. “Hey.” She wiggled her hand beside her blush cheek. “It’s okay. How do you feel?”

 

“Don’t get up,” Covvai added.

 

Genji rebelled with a lift of his head to survey the room, and found himself in the faculty suite appearing as it might in a realty showing: completely naked in bright overheads, no shadows, the bonsai leaves flat gray instead of green. He had not answered Ran, but that did not seem to bother her as she typed on her tablet with the Vishkar diamond lotus on the back. Covvai pinned his head back down with a swipe of her hand. He smiled at her. She scowled.

 

“Ah, you have done it Doctors,” he grated out of a newly reactivated synthesizer. “Finally, I can see!”

 

“Remember what I said about jokes, Genji,” Ran warned absently as she continued to flitter over the tablet. “You are doing great.” The soft knocks of her fingertips were the only noises for another minute. Genji shoved his arm at the tablet in an artless sweep. Ran tugged the device from his fingers, and Covvai lifted his failed limb back onto the bed. “You okay?” Ran blinked. He stared at her, and she consulted Covvai. “Bring him up a little more?” Covvai held out the full wingspan of her scrawny arms to show the lack of wires still lodged to Genji.

 

“Time,” she cracked.

 

Ran pursed her lips, and crossed her legs, watching Genji. He thought about dozing off, but Covvai had her needle eyes on him too.

 

“Trying,” he coughed after another few minutes, pinning his elbows on the bed to sit up. Ran reached out, glanced at Covvai, and Covvai shrugged. Ran held his back, and her hand was slick and small on his gray layer. She balanced him, laying down her precious tablet for a moment so she could mound the pillows up behind him. She grasped his shoulders to guide him back.

 

“Comfy?”

 

He nodded a little. “Do you remember where you are?”

 

“Paradise.”

 

“Cut the crap,” she scolded through grinning teeth. “Where are you right now?”

 

“Oasis University.”

 

“What are you doing at Oasis University?”

 

“Had a procedure.”

 

Covvai got up and left the room, a slate blue box and a heavy loop of cables bundled in her arms.

 

“Yes,” Ran nodded. “You were down about nineteen hours, so do not be alarmed if your chronometer shows a weird time.” Genji glanced at the door where Covvai had gone, then rolled on his side, looking down the angles of his body. “It’s okay,” Ran agreed of his posture. “Just don’t go back to sleep.” Genji’s eyes rose to the dry clothing lined along the open windows, last night’s water stains darkening the paint and spotting the marble.

 

“This kind of thing used to be my life,” he said, and looked over his shoulder. “This is the nicest way I have ever woken up though.” Ran smiled quickly at him between pecks at her tablet. Genji heard Covvai returning-- at least, it was the scratch of her voice, but it was rising in laughter, chatting eagerly, and her footsteps sounded oddly duplicitous --and turned onto his back. It was Covvai’s hand that retreated from the sliding door lever, and she proceeded through the door, the only machinery left in her arms a datapad that she used to dim the lights to less surgical intensity. Zenyatta followed in her wake.

 

And behind him, the dove-white steel of Mondatta walked into the light.

 

And behind him, the seven-light sister, Lumanti.

 

Genji greeted the trio of omnics with an inarticulate happy _noise,_ and covered his grinning mouth. Gliding patterned robes, silver bodies, and warm arms circled around him: Mondatta hauled him off the pillows in a hug, Lumanti rested her palms on his lower back and stomach, Zenyatta touched a single hand between his shoulderblades. Genji’s face did not click as he came together with them, and realized it was soft pink skin getting squished to their plates. They were very careful not to bruise him. His knee arched as he hooked his elbow around Mondatta’s neck, another arm for Lumanti’s waist. “You have time for me?” he pleaded of the Shambali.

 

“Zenyatta objected,” Mondatta said. Genji’s fingers tangled in his sash. “Or I would have brought more. As it is, Lumanti will represent them.” Genji looked over the smallest of the monks, and thumbed the rich navy pattern of her robe. He could feel her fingers in the stitching.

 

“You are dressed up so pretty.” Lumanti’s array fluttered. “This blue, it is my favorite color,” he gushed. “Does it mean something?” Mondatta wore only the yellow and brown he customarily took in the village. Lumanti glanced at him before she answered.

 

“It means I want to look nice for my brother.” She pushed the contour of her static cheek against Genji’s. “Because everyone travels with me.”

 

“If you guys could back up for a sec,” Ran interrupted, her face gone flat as she stared down the welcoming cheer. “I have a few more advisories for him.” Covvai stood behind her, smiling with watery eyes. Genji sucked his desire to question the reality of this scenario back into his chest. If it was a dream, he would wake up sometime, right?

 

Ran glanced at the older woman. “We’re all set here.” Covvai’s eyebrows rose, her joy wilted, and she left. The Shambali released Genji, though he took Lumanti’s hand when she tried to step back, and their joined fingers rested on the mattress top. Zenyatta hugged the corner of the cot, while Mondatta withdrew the furthest, his head turned to Ran. The slow ticks of his faceplate downward indicated he was reviewing her Vishkar uniform.

 

Ran budged in on the opposite side of Lumanti, frowning at the joined hands, but catching herself to flash her teeth at Genji. “How do the new sensory paths feel?” Genji contracted his fingers on Lumanti’s, scraping the gray joints between the metal hulls of her extremities.

 

“Like not living in a jar.”

 

“It’s not overwhelming you anywhere?” Ran produced a flat tong that set Genji’s shoulders very straight, but she merely stroked the side of his abdomen and leg with it. She took his other hand for her own and stippled his fingertips with a prod. When she dabbed the center of his palm, his fingers contracted.

 

“I remember, this is how my body feels.” His chest tightened as he spoke, but he got away with no more than a shaky sigh. Lumanti ruffed his hair.

 

“Great.” Ran eyed the second contact. “Pair with the tablet?” Genji reached toward the device, and a couple files transferred to his storage. “The first one is the blueprint for the sensory paths, and the other is the new processor balancing algorithms.” Genji fired the files off to Zenyatta, who he supposed might read them. Zenyatta raised his head after a moment.

 

“I see. I will transfer this information to the Engineer,” he told Genji. Genji nodded. Ran tapped the tablet and another file emerged.

 

“This is a manual from Dr. Oberon. He is going to meet with you in a few hours and show you some things, he wants you to read it first.” Genji glanced at Mondatta and Lumanti, but they were waiting patiently, not even a flicker in their lights. He held his knees closer together, and passed the file to Zenyatta. Ran waggled her eyebrows. “It’s the fun part, right? Oberon says he likes it because he gets to break out some sock puppets.”

 

Genji released Lumanti and covered his face with both hands. Her fingers settled over his, peeling his cover away gently. “Surprising, the wise guy can’t take a joke,” Ran wondered.

 

“Was there anything else?”

 

She pivoted on her seat to find Mondatta’s smooth face angled at her. She took a breath and smiled at him.

 

“Just a couple things. Genji, you should not get out of bed until tomorrow morning, even if you feel fine. That is Angela’s instruction.” Smiling as Lumanti pulled her mouth liner away from his forehead, Genji gave the room a perfunctory search for the other doctor. “The team is resting too,” Yuhara filled in. “Tomorrow you can walk around the immediate campus, but we are going to monitor for a few days to make sure everything feels right.”

 

She tipped her tablet closer to examine the time. “I am going to bring you some food in an hour.” Lumanti perked up. “You’ll have to eat it, sorry. We’re testing. Other than that, you can rest with your family now.” She looked to the foot of the bed. “Zenyatta has the emergency contact information.” Zenyatta nodded. “Great! See you in a bit.” She departed through the living room. Outside the window, it began to rain.

 

Genji sank into the mound of pillows. Mondatta helped himself to the stool Ran abandoned.

 

“May I bring you anything she did not address?” he asked. Genji waved one hand under his chin.

 

“No, thank you. I am fine like this.” But Zenyatta drifted up to the front of the bed and lifted his shoulder, adjusting a couple of the pillows beneath it. When Genji laid back, it was much more comfortable, and his lips circled in surprise.

 

“I suppose Zenyatta always knows,” Mondatta sighed.

 

“Ah-h.” Genji looked helplessly between the omnics, then nodded. “Mondatta, you can tell me about the…peace effort?”

 

“You would like me to tell you a story?”

 

Genji’s eyes shifted to one side, then back to the Shambali leader, and he grinned. “I suppose I can manage that,” Mondatta laughed. Lumanti was already bringing over more luxurious chairs for him and herself, pillaging them from the living room.

 

He spoke long enough for the food to arrive, cutting himself off abruptly when Ran appeared in the doorway. Genji answered Lumanti’s desperate ogling with “No, I only want to share the taste of good food!” as he inhaled some kind of vegetable pudding-porridge. Mondatta returned to his oration after, and closed the remaining hours before Oberon arrived and cleared all Shambali from the room.

 

When the heavily armored doctor allowed everyone back in, he ducked his thick frame at Mondatta. Mondatta touched his shoulder, and Oberon’s single light fluxed nearly white. Mondatta did not take a seat, but lingered by the foot of the bed. “I do not mean to invoke your wrath,” he bowed deeply to Genji. “But I wonder if there is anywhere to walk this campus without being interrupted? It is my first time to this place.”

 

“There is a courtyard outside a lecture hall. The students all disappear after class, so they don’t use it.” Genji stammered. “It’s…” He looked at Zenyatta. Mondatta did too.

 

“I can show you,” Zenyatta offered after getting intensely studied a few seconds. “There are so many hazards to being known,” he added, a little sassier, to his brother. Both Shambali Masters looked at the omnic remaining at Genji’s bedside, and Zenyatta’s array brightened. “Lumanti, will you watch over Genji for us? He is prone to wander, and as we have heard he is not allowed just yet.”

 

“I wonder if there was any sort of influential person close to Genji, educating him in this vagrant tendency?” Mondatta mused. Lumanti looked a little bright and anxious as her face ticked from one Master to the other. Mondatta nodded to her, and her posture broke.

 

“O-of course, Masters! Thank you!” She lowered her head until both of them had gone. Genji noticed a couple human bodyguards taking station around the entryway as Mondatta held the door for Zenyatta. Lumanti surveyed the available chairs, then sat on the side of the bed, folding her hands in her lap as she gazed down at Genji.

 

“I am done with today,” he grumbled. She laughed.

 

“And I had so many questions for you.”

 

He turned on his side, cleared the pillows off the side of the bed so he laid flat, and propped his knuckles against his cheek.

 

“Like what?”

 

Lumanti studied his posture, and tentatively tucked her legs up on the mattress. She laid down opposite him, the reflection of the overhead an extra star on her face.

 

“Can you tell me about the world? I only ever see it when I travel with Mondatta.”

 

Genji called up the sensory records of the storm above the East China Sea he had transmitted to the Shambali network. Lumanti had even commented on it, a starry-eyed emoji. Her eyelights glowed as he transmitted it to her again. “When you came online, you sent us memories from the monastery to the ocean. But you did not send anything from the places after that,” she tutted. “Zenyatta says you have been to Japan, and the U.S.A., and to other places in Iraq before coming here.”

 

“I did not send anything?” Genji reviewed his posts, and she was accurate. Blushing, he shared the New Mexico monsoon, cropping the part where the Pegasus’s head exploded in the background. “It is nothing new,” he dismissed. “The whole world is desert except by the sea and in Nepal.”

 

“That is not true…” Lumanti began, only to flash her lights in alarm. “Why does Master Zenyatta kick you?”

 

“We were just sparring.” He balled his fists, fingertips tickling his own palms, and motored his forearms on the mattress top. Lumanti watched, then imitated him, just as cartoonish. “You do not learn to fight?”

 

“We do not need to experience more violence.” Her voice changed, more rigid. Genji lifted his head at the door.

 

“But Mondatta keeps hiring humans with guns.”

 

Lumanti tilted her faceplate into the mattress.

 

“That is different.” She pulled her arms in to her chest, crossing them over her robe. “That is because of King’s Row.” Genji reached out and took one of her hands, and she looked up.

 

“Show me a place you have been?” he suggested. “Besides that one.”

 

Lumanti silently traded her own data, surprising him with Tokyo: cats gleaming giant on building-tops, skyscrapers on posts to secure them from the encroaching sea. He could feel the ocean breeze wrapping her frame, tugging at the silk around her legs. At one point she was on the top layer of a double-decker bus, sneaking glances at an omnic and human holding hands in the seat next to hers. Then she was street-level again. Mondatta spoke, but the amplifiers for his synth were far away. Lumanti looked down a pearl-walled alley at a market, trying to understand one of the smells emerging from it.

 

“It’s eel,” he offered to the memory. “They are grilling it.”

 

“Oh, I thought the protein content was very high,” she lamented, shaking her head. “I liked the scent.”

 

“I will not tell Mondatta.” He stuck out his tongue. She poked the red protrusion with her finger. He withdrew, and protected his mouth with the back of his hand. “When Zenyatta and I journeyed across the sea, it was on a fishing boat. I used to eat a lot of fish, because in Japan, it is very normal. There is water everywhere. It is not desert yet.”

 

“No, I understand.” She rested her hand over his shoulder. “Like the villagers, and their barn animals. And we take from them too sometimes, for our clothing.” She pinched her deep blue robe.

 

“Your beautiful clothing,” Genji said. Lumanti bundled closer to him, array dimming. She showed him another record: puddles in the streets, a black night without stars, buildings spiking neon through the fog.

 

“Water everywhere,” she murmured.

 

“It is still scary,” he agreed.

 

“I am stronger now,” she admitted. “Master says we are making progress.” She looked at the door and the bodyguards beyond. “I have told him he does not need to go in-person. The principles of the Iris hold true in all souls, his words will resonate no matter from what pulpit he speaks. …why do you look away, Brother?”

 

Genji moistened his lips, not expecting to get called on. He shook his head.

 

“I was just thinking, this country seems like it has problems too.” Lumanti nodded, embracing him, squeezing him tight. Genji lifted his head. “Is it okay for him to be out there?”

 

“Oh, it is very safe _here_.” Lumanti showed him an advertisement discussing surveillance measures. _OASIS: Safety-- and Science! –for All_ , it said. “He just brought the humans to make sure no one would bother you. This is the safest city in the world, except maybe our village.” Her array peppered a silent laugh. “Their approach here is a little different though.”

 

“It would be safe if we were to leave and take a walk too,” Genji proposed. Lumanti held up her palm between their faces.

 

“That is impossible. I will never disobey Master! We will stay.”

 

“Zenyatta thinks disobedience and mischief are natural elements of the student-teacher relationship,” he cooed. Lumanti’s mechanical innards rang as she shifted around on the mattress.

 

“I have never thought of that,” she wondered in a scandalous squeak.

 

“’Master’ does not mean there is no more room for growth,” Genji hummed. “Or further ways to be challenged. Master and student learn from each other, right?”

 

“Of course.” Her tone dried: “Wait, you are just trying to get me to let you up.” Lumanti’s lights dwindled. He grinned. “I knew it!” she crowed.

 

“Why do you call them Master?” Genji pressed.

 

“It is not obvious?”

 

“Zenyatta said he and Mondatta were only born a few minutes before the rest of you. But they both act so differently.”

 

“Of course they do…” Lumanti’s lights blinked several times at him, her synth huffing a sigh. Genji persisted.

 

“So, why is that?”

 

“Because they were the only ones that saw it.”

 

“Saw what?”

 

She shook her head at him, and held up her finger to make sure he paid attention.

 

“The Iris!”

 

* * *

 

Mondatta laid his hands over Genji’s.

 

“I apologize for leaving so soon.”

 

Genji bowed as he held onto Mondatta’s slender wrists.

 

“I feel really good. And I know you are busy.” Mondatta slid back from him, nodding.

 

“We received a package addressed to you,” he noted. “There was no return address. I put it in your room.”

 

“You should have your guards--”

 

“All donations and gifts pass a security screening,” Mondatta added flatly.

 

“Oh! Then I will try to visit soon.”

 

“I should hope so. Our brothers and sisters are clamoring to hear more of your adventures, after what you shared with Lumanti was passed along.” The blue-robed monk looked every way but at the conversation and she stood straighter at Mondatta’s side.

 

“I will see you, Brother,” Zenyatta said from beside Genji. The Shambali leader lowered his head in a nod.

 

“And I you,” he replied fondly. “You know the way.” He looked over the Oasis cityscape from his ship plot over the still, artificial waters. “Truly it was wonderful to see the inquiring minds gathered here, to such effect.”

 

“Perhaps it is another path,” Zenyatta suggested, and Mondatta peered back down at him.

 

“At least, it has allowed our Genji to be healed,” he answered.

 

“Yes,” Zenyatta agreed more fervently. Genji squeezed an arm over his shoulders.

 

“Goodbye,” Mondatta said. Lumanti bowed, staying forward until Mondatta had gone through the door of his white ship. Genji did not see the steadfast ant inside, only more human guards. Lumanti boarded after, glancing over and making a little wave at him. Both he and Zenyatta waved back.

 

The white ship extended its wings over their heads, and took off gentle as a breeze, turning crescent over the shimmering waterfalls, reflecting the pink and gold of the sand in the air. Genji heard Angela’s heels clicking up behind him, but his eyes remained on the ship till he could no longer pick it out of the horizon.

 

“I did not want to interrupt,” she said softly. To say little of the fact that she would not have understood the Nepali language conversation. Genji glanced at her.

 

“It’s okay, Angela,” he said, visor saturating, friendly. “What’s up?”

 

She blinked. Hesitated. Finally spoke:

 

“I am glad to see you have so many that love you. I wish…more people knew the life you do.” Genji tilted his head. “Did…” She glanced at Zenyatta, and then smiled at Genji when the monk said nothing. “If you have no more need of me, I need to return west. The triage camp for the hospital victims is still in operation, they have desperate need of doctors.”

 

“Shouldn’t you stay here, Angela? In Oasis?” he replied. “They have a lot of security systems. There won’t be any ghosts.” Her eyes widened. They bugged less from her sockets than before, her skin less slack over her skull. Every day since he had met her again, she recovered. Angela dissolved into a weak smile.

 

“I did not become a physician to hide from my patients, I am sorry to say. Places like this have many doctors, and they operate on a privileged few. Those most in need are trapped in wars, in poverty, in unsafe places…do you understand? Oasis does not share with the rest of the country. They are too busy being a part of the bleeding edge.” Angela shook her head. “I will not make the mistake of isolating myself in my work again. I must have compassion.”

 

“You want to be a hero,” he suggested. She lifted her shoulders, smile trembling.

 

“If that is what those principles mean.”

 

“Do you like writing?”

 

“Hm?” she wondered. Genji made a pen motion with his hand.

 

“When I woke up, you were writing a letter. Do you like that more than a phone?” He flapped his hand as she blinked, and her face drew long and flat in a kind of unspoken alarm. “It is okay if you do. I will not judge you!” Angela blinked again.

 

“You uncovered my terrible secret,” she admitted, color summoned to her cheeks.

 

“So, is there a place I can write to you? I will get paper the next time I go to the monastery.”

 

“O-Of course, Genji,” she chuckled. She took out her phone, but instead of showing him her ID, she displayed an address in Switzerland. “That is my apartment. If you send it there, my landlord will forward it to my most current address.”

 

“Thanks.” He recorded the address text. “You do not have a big fancy house?”

 

“Unnecessary and expensive. I am hardly ever there.”

 

Eventually he and Zenyatta were alone on the private tarmac, just two more glistening spots on the long white pier across the water. The sun was setting, so Genji expected rain, only to see the line of raindrops ended just offshore of the main island of Oasis.

 

Zenyatta was staring steadfastly at the white plasmetal ground. “What is it?” Genji asked.

 

The monk’s hand flowed up to him, hovering just off the reflective silver wings sheltering his chest. Zenyatta looked to the etched _25_ on the left plate. Genji followed his eyes, and then turned around slowly on his thin metal legs, ribbon sailing around him with the breeze. Zenyatta’s hand stayed close to his rotating body, fingers twitching apart, and dropping away when Genji faced him once more.

 

“I am returning west with Dr. Ziegler,” Zenyatta said. The wind died, and without the rain, the sunlight on Genji’s body became a sticky, muffling balm. “There are many in need that were not protected.”

 

“You will heal them all, will you?”

 

“I will try Mondatta’s way. I will do as much as I can.”

 

“ _We_ will,” Genji snorted. “I am not afraid of helping with something other than a blade. The blade did not even work,” he laughed faintly.

 

“You would go only because I am there.”

 

Genji turned his weight from one foot to the other, uncertain of the point. Zenyatta stretched his arm to something at Genji’s back. “Look, my friend.”

 

He lifted his head over his shoulder, and turned to face it: the long eastern flat of the desert visible past the corona of red mountains, sinking into night. “That is what you want,” Zenyatta said. Genji set his shoulders back, visor losing color.

 

“You speak of my brother.”

 

“Your revenge lies there. Go and claim it,” Zenyatta ordered. Genji turned back, the world of Oasis soft and tropical around him, the monk ahead a hard, cold steel statue.

 

“You mean to abandon me.”

 

“I would like you to make a choice.” Zenyatta held his perfectly balanced palms to either side. “The heights of your spirit are open to you, but you will never reach them as you are.” Genji shivered, widening the stance of his legs to hide it.

 

“My brother is dangerous. He is like the ones who attacked Jesse, or the blue woman, or the people in King’s Row. He is what stands between me and you.”

 

“I will not give you justification for murder, and I do not desire your return for nothing more than friendship.”

 

Genji reared back on his heels. “Go east, and think on your purpose,” Zenyatta insisted. “I realized it is not a place where I can clear the path before your feet.”

 

“Zen,” he pleaded.

 

“Seek harmony, you will always find me.” Zenyatta must have thought that worthy assurance. He turned away. His name grayed out on Genji’s contact list, _[OFFLINE]_.

 

Genji’s visor blinked. He took a step after the monk. It would be infinitely easy to catch up.

 

“You cannot escape me!” he roared down the tarmac, gaining confidence. “I can find you any time I want! I will bring you Hanzo’s head!” Zenyatta did not turn back, or reply, and Genji lost the hard, hero-like vault of his shoulders. He sat down cross-legged in the middle of the landing pad, watching the glimmer of Zenyatta’s body disappear in the evening. When he finally walked back to the mainland, the monk was not waiting for him.

 

The rain had already passed and dried, so Oasis felt unchanged. A high moon tattooed by an ambitious experiment gleamed whole and pink and perfect over the unfinished tower. Traffic screamed down the freeway in waves of candied neon. Someone mashed oud stringwork with electronica and pirated the airport speaker broadcast to share their creation with the immaculate shoreline. People danced and dined on the layered jungle terraces, wine glasses and teeth sparkling. Drones shot back and forth down the alleyways where they were safe from cars, trying to keep up with the ancient discoveries and innovations spreading their wings at every moment. Humans bought clothes and tempted the mist barriers in the basin park so they could flirt across the gardens and the empty festival tents. The air flowed in perfume: cinnamon, mint, ambrosia. Paradise.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter:** Pain is an excellent teacher.
>   * [Arabic calligraphy](http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/c/calligraphy-in-islamic-art/) is [rad](http://www.arabiccalligraphy.com).
>   * _kanji:_ Japanese adaptations of Chinese characters, part of the Japanese writing system
>   * _kana:_ Japanese characters, each one representing one sound in Japanese langauge (consists of two separate libraries called _hiragana_ and _katakana_ ) -- conventions for writing modern Japanese typically include both kana and kanji in any given sentence
>   * Hana Sadiq is a contemporary Iraqi fashion designer who designs kaftan and abaya gowns.
>   * _abaya:_ a cloak or robe-like dress worn over other clothing in Arab countries
>   * _kaftan:_ a long tunic or robe worn by men and women in many countries, Mesopotamian origin 
>   * _thawb:_ I did not mention this one by name, but here you go anyway (☞ﾟ∀ﾟ)☞ a robe worn to the ankles in Arab countries, traditionally useful for traveling in the desert due to its "mobile AC" properties
>   * Fear the post-apocalyptic future of Overwatch, where bellbottoms have been raised from the dead to conquer Earth!
>   * _Kobe:_ A city in Japan (it's where Kobe beef comes from).
>   * Blizz releasing Doomfist and all kinds of crazy stuff is very hazardous to my attempts to finalize chapters. Game needs to quit being so good.
>   * On the other hand, it gave me some material for a section I was planning in the next (real) chapter, so thanks Blizz?
> 



	16. When You Break

 

“Get up.”

 

Not Jesse this time.

 

Genetic tampering augmented his shadowy fan of shoulder bones, blossomed in the drum stride of his boots across the teak, and conjured deep, greedy breaths in the sticky air, ever closer to Genji. Empty prong-tipped vials rocked on the floor beside the tucked cyborg. Dried fluid caked Genji’s upper back, smudging the soft glow of his ports. Genji tightened his arms around his folded legs. A scarred hand crushed his ribbon, and Mr. Reyes yanked Genji’s faceplate out of his knees.

 

Orange light etched broad cheekbones and hard triceps under a black layman’s jacket, and caught in the sclera of Mr. Reyes’s glaring eyes. “On your feet.” He let go, and Genji sagged bonelessly against the wall.

 

The date read a week off from when he first sat down. His permanent tabi toes rifled through hills of blank business cards as he extended his legs. Filing cabinets with gaping, vomiting drawers clogged the walls, stationary drooling from metal mouths. Mr. Reyes stomped back to the window, shadow growing huge across the walls. Flecks of darkness circled his silhouette. The tiny light of Genji’s visor turned, seeking the ghost responsible, finding mayflies carving hazy circles wherever sunlight cleared the wall of Mr. Reyes’s body.

 

He started at unnatural ebony protrusions from Mr. Reyes’s eyes, only to realize in an unsourced fit of nausea that they were binoculars. One of the flies drifted toward a swollen vein poking from Mr. Reyes’s jacket collar, and a palm gray with dust and healed wounds cocked off the binoculars to slap it away. Genji watched the insect careen into the wall, exploding in glitter and yellow blood.

 

“Where…?” he convinced his synthesizer to spit, and he collected himself above the rustling puddles of business cards.

 

“Numbani.” Mr. Reyes retreated from the hull of the binoculars to sniff at him: “It’s in Nigeria.” Genji flattened a hand on the side of his helmet.

 

“Numbani?”

 

“Oh.” Mr. Reyes’s pitch fluttered upwards. “You do know it?” He locked his face back to the eyepieces.

 

“Jesse.” Genji shook his head.

 

“Not here.” A growl, loud as a wolf in Genji’s ear. “Don’t think about him. Stick to the mission.” Brown eyes emerged from the binocular shell to watch Genji finish kicking off the sedative. Hard, accurate pupils contracted at Genji’s hand. “What’s that?” Mr. Reyes demanded. Genji looked down, and relaxed his fingers from a sakura-print business card he had crumpled in half. “Give it to me before you totally wreck it.” Pulled by string, Genji’s hand rose to deliver the card to Mr. Reyes’s ragged palm. The Soldier slipped the cherry blossoms into his pocket. “You can have it back at debrief.”

 

“I don’t want it,” Genji insisted, synth choking like an ungreased axle after so little use. “I just want to complete the mission.” He joined Mr. Reyes at the window, polarizing his visor against the sunrise.

 

Dawn spoked through the coiled horns of a mechanical antelope twenty meters high. Levitating skyscraper sections quilted shadows down the street. Jungles in protective matrices of blue diamond ringed office towers. Fish stink swam through the window from a seafood restaurant on the corner. Hologram skirts of brand logos and stock tickers teased the fringes of white sidewalks. Omnics, carrying suitcases, filed into the antelope tower. Genji perked on his toes. Mr. Reyes caught him under the chrome wings of his breastplate.

 

“ _No,_ ” he ordered, pushing on the glowing green dial in the center. “Not this time.” Genji tracked the pencil-wire ankle of the final omnic leg through the rotating door at the base of the tower. His head swerved at Mr. Reyes. “Calibrate the mission parameters with the ops server again,” Mr. Reyes grumbled. “Target is human.” Genji rocked onto his heels, contacting the organization systems. Mr. Reyes dropped his restraining arm. “You understand that finishing this mission does not mean we are turning around and running back to Hanamura?” he added in a chalky mutter.

 

“If I kill everyone in this world, you will have no one else to send me after besides him,” Genji suggested in monotone as he reviewed the mission.

 

Mr. Reyes smirked.

 

“That’s what I like to hear. You got that it’s a capture protocol, right?”

 

“I calibrated.” Genji shrugged.

 

“We need the target’s information on Talon activities. Unless you recall anything you feel like divulging?” Mr. Reyes entreated with a scrunched press of his lips.

 

“I don’t know what Father was doing with them.”

 

“Didn’t think so. Here’s the deal: I was hoping the target would show by today, but it looks like he’s shy. I need to hit HQ and catch up on some other matters. Sleep, maybe.” Mr. Reyes abandoned the binoculars. They dangled down his chest on a canvas strap. He leaned through the empty frame of the window, scanning the business district with his naked eyes. Blue and green smartcars puttered between intersections, larger cars from out of town claimed metered spaces, though many bodies arrived by bus or on their feet from a nearby metro stop. On the steps of a bank with a commanding blue-black panel façade, a little boy played a game on his phone, toy drone slumped over his thigh as it watched his progress. The drone’s singular eye swelled enough to show the pink light at the core at events on the phone screen. Its excited _bee-dwee_ s trickled across the street and through the window of the haunted warehouse.

 

“You are not staying?” Genji’s shoulders spiked.

 

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Mr. Reyes wondered at him. “Your glorious return to no-leash operations.” He flipped up his sleeve to examine a thick black chronometer. “Check in with the tech every six hours regardless of results. Anything suspicious, or you spot the target, you report in. I’ll get SC to send back-up. Do not engage on your own, got it?”

 

Genji nodded.

 

“And after this mission, you will let me go to Hanzo.”

 

“That’s not--” Mr. Reyes exhaled through his nose, flapped his arms up. “Eventually.”

 

“You should not run surveillance for so long, Mr. Reyes,” Genji cooed. Mr. Reyes knotted the bridge of his nose, jaw hardening to rare uncertainty.

 

“Why not?”

 

“There is gray in your beard.” Genji’s lights glared brighter. “You would not want to become old.” Mr. Reyes went a little cross-eyed trying to account his own chin.

 

“I’m already old,” he confessed. “Good gene work hides it, but everybody gets old-- except you, I guess. It isn’t something to fear.” He cupped his hairy jaw and the purported silver streak, digging his fingers into his cheek. “This is just sympathy for the SC’s hairline.” Mr. Reyes grinned, thick eyebrows jabbing at the gnarly remains of his crew cut.

 

Genji stared silently at him. “…alright. I’ll hear from you soon, Shimada.” He hauled a couple massive shotguns off their lopsided posts at the wall and marched out of the room, business cards lashed into the air by his combat boots. Genji listened to the footsteps long after Mr. Reyes ducked out a back window on the bottom floor. When he turned back to Numbani, mayflies flew from his shoulders and head in a twisting, shimmering curtain.

 

Two days later, Genji crawled out of the small storage room onto the breezy windowsill. The lip of pale wood barely fit the outlines of his feet. Wind toiled around him, lifting his ribbon from his shiny back. That morning, as the sun rose, his visor drooped away from street surveillance and fixed on the long, smooth flat of sidewalk pavement several stories beneath him. By midday, while the sky sang blue and bright and unseen by him, his fingers clenched on the edge of the sill in little fits.

 

Movement disrupted his visor pane: omnic and human, arm-in-arm. His back peaked straight, targeting chevrons popping over the couple’s heads. The targets wore checkered, midriff-baring dresses and layered coral necklaces, and they walked a couple spotted dogs with punk white manes. He checked trajectories, flight angles, identities-- neither target matched the headshot provided by the ops server.

 

Genji rolled his shuriken back into his wrist.

 

He raised his face to the sky, inhaling the blue sea where no omnic could walk into the frame and confuse him. Omnics were still the first things he saw as he pulled his visor back to the street, shining in the windows of the skyscrapers. Genji blinked the visual feed on and off, clearing a blanket of blurry feedback, though not the ache it set in his head. He noticed a snow-white ultrawide with a high cab idling on a curb in front of the bank. Leopard print camo sketched the hoverjet wells, appearing and disappearing at different angles. Inside the wells, each jet port was lined in thick, nonstandard plasmetal armor. The vehicle shared an aesthetic family tree with the smaller tanks in the organization’s transport bays. He tried a few filters on the tinted windows, but could not see inside. Genji submitted the license plate to the technicians.

 

They replied that a strike team was incoming from Watchpoint Gibraltar. _Stand by._

 

On the ETA timer’s final ticks, a woman with rivers of stone-colored beads threaded through her bleached braiding emerged from the bank. She was thumbing her phone as she studied the screen over the rims of cateye sunglasses. She headed for the white vehicle, its passenger door fanning upward with a pressurized _ping_. Ops server did not recognize her.

 

Light feet tapped up the warehouse fire escape behind Genji, Mr. Reyes divided a thousand times to a featherweight.

 

“Hiya!” Lena Oxton chirped from the doorway. He turned just enough to include her in the visor peripheral. “Wow…” She walked to the window, hands on her hips. “Isn’t that dangerous, Genji?” she asked as she hiked a knee and lifted herself onto the windowsill beside him. Genji’s visor fluttered.

 

Oxton blinked at the dust stain covering the front of his armor, and from him turned her eyes on the vehicle below. The woman in the cateye sunglasses froze with one hand on the door, her head turning around the street. Other cars had been parked and emptied, the dogwalkers sheltered under the umbrella of a vacated food stand two blocks down and gawked. Omnics retreated from the wall offices of the skyscrapers, Genji’s red targeting outlines fizzling from their gangly silhouettes. The glasses woman consulted her phone, and turned the screen out to show another party inside the car. “Oh I see!” Oxton tipped at the scene. “Hey, boss~” she hummed at the storage room door. “Looks like we haven’t time to prepare.”

 

Genji twitched as heavy feet rasped across the warehouse floor to them. Pressure sensors activated in his shoulder: Lena, holding his arm. His helmet shifted her way, the expressionless beak of a hawk. She smiled at him.

 

Winston grunted sideways through the doorframe, fur and suit panels rubbing every conceivable surface. He emerged with a case of static fuzz, and shook himself as he padded up to the window on his knuckles. Lena held Genji’s shoulder as he leaned away from the oncoming gorilla.

 

“Give me a sec to confirm the status of the civilians.” Winston plopped on the floor, pulling a laptop case off his back. Holograms lit the room blue. Genji relaxed his shoulders, and bobbed his head, approximating a nod at Oxton. Still smiling, she crossed her legs and rocked on the windowsill beside him.

 

“I mean we really don’t even have a second,” she laughed over her shoulder. “He’s pulling away!”

 

“I’m not too worried about speed with this team,” Winston huffed. He licked one of his long upper canines as he studied a drone feed. His eyes drifted off-screen a couple times, and he plucked a business card with spaceship stationary off the floor. “Hm.” He put the card down. _EMERGENCY EVACUATION ORDER_ flashed in the lower right corner of the hologram array. Winston’s forehead wrinkled. “What’s his acceleration, Genji?”

 

“Twenty,” Genji crackled. The white vehicle crawled slowly down the street, crossing the axis of their camouflaged watchtower. “He just stopped.”

 

“Stopped? Why?” Winston pushed his glasses up his nose.

 

“You fellas sure are going about this business-like,” Oxton drawled, one eye on the evacuation progress bar. She made finger-guns at Genji. “Want to spar a bit when we get back love? I’ll give you a chance to redeem yourself.” Genji’s visor flashed, he pivoted to her and rested a hand over his wakizashi.

 

“You want to fight?” he demanded.

 

“Not quite my meaning…” Oxton crossed her arms and folded her imaginary guns into her armpits.

 

“Guys--” Winston groaned, and both of them looked at him.

 

The driver door of the white car exploded off its hinges in a wrenching crack.

 

Genji twisted, one hand dug into the windowsill. The door was already a missile, rocketing at their perch. Oxton’s eyes began turning to the sound. Genji snared her ribcage in his arm and jumped straight up. The rocket of white metal slammed the window and fired a web of cracks across the face of the warehouse. Genji and his cargo dangled two floors up, Genji clawing an outcrop.

 

“Whoa! Thanks!” Oxton exclaimed, though her eyes pinched and she pushed on the metal arm strangling her ribcage.

 

“Target confirmed!” Winston yelped as he punched the blockage from the window below. It fell to the ground in a streak of fuzzy dust. “He’s exiting the vehicle!”

 

Genji pinned a targeting chevron over the dark gap in the side of the car. He ignored the pleading nudges of Oxton’s hands on his wrist.

 

Bare metal feet capped in notes of gold slipped down onto the street. _Human target,_ Mr. Reyes whispered inside Genji. As targets went, humans did not differ from omnics: they ran, they screamed. Gushed more when they died. The target ducked out of the warped doorframe, eyes closed as he straightened in the Numbani sun. Down one side, he gleamed with the scales of a golden dragon.

 

Genji’s chest hitched. Akande Ogundimu opened his eyes, looking up the warehouse wall, scarlet LEDs brightening across his segmented mechanical body. Genji’s fingers cracked the jaw of the upper window. Shadows of birds fled across his faceplate. The sunglasses woman threw her heavy purse into the car and ducked through the intact side after it, and the vehicle revved away down the street. Ogundimu awaited them, unclothed chest lifting in steady breaths.

 

“Catch up when you can!” Winston shouted. He bounded out of the storage room and dropped to the street with a steadying flare of the blue jet thrusters on the back of his suit. “Attack!”

 

“Gotcha!” Oxton squeaked, and she dematerialized from Genji’s talons in a streak of fiery yellow. After a few pants of static, she added “Come on Genji!” over comms.

 

Genji climbed to the warehouse roof. He cleared his body into the sky. Winston roared beneath him. Cars banged down the street, or made chaotic, momentary bursts of jazz orchestra as they struck the nearest buildings. Only one of the combatants noticed the wingless hawk flying in a jade streak between skyscrapers. Genji neared a tower face of pearl blue glass and his legs bent into a running impact, processor calculating the right angle to maintain a grip and flexing his feet automatically. He landed in a prismatic fracture of windowpane, already sprinting forward, one hand on his sword hilt.

 

Gravity sped him toward the target. Winston vanished through the jagged glass of an empty diner. Ogundimu sweat in the sun, his screws and panels and cutaway seams glinting as he turned toward Genji. His neck, coated in the same protective scales as Genji’s, pivoted up the skyscraper. His eyes tuned across Genji’s bare mesh of prosthetics. Ogundimu, the _human target_ , used the man-sized golden gauntlet encasing his right arm to tear the door from another car and swing it into the air.

 

End over end, the irregular knife spun up the building at Genji, shrieking across the glass. He jumped before it cut him in half, liberating shuriken to both hands as he corkscrewed toward the target in the air. Genji fired on the soft folds of muscle coating Ogundimu’s gut, stemming his own momentum with a heel to the base of the skyscraper before he sprang forward to meet the other cyborg.

 

The shuriken filed narrow scratches along the sides of Ogundimu’s abdomen, the white flaying of silicone, not a centimeter of blood. Genji drew his wakizashi. Screws ground inside Ogundimu as he hauled his gauntlet in front of his chest. Oxton’s pistol bullets ejected fruitless squirts of coolant from his back, drizzling the royal rose sash around his waist. Genji tested the gauntlet with the wakizashi, and his blade sang across its brother metal harmlessly.

 

Two little birds spun around a pillar of stone. Winston never returned. Oxton’s breath spewed over comms, but never words. Ogundimu’s wide eyes traced Genji’s green afterimage as he streamed beneath the gauntlet, too fast to be caught in its terminal fist. Genji turned on his toe, lowering his sword for another chip at the muscle blocks. Oxton swept across the target’s blindside with him, and Ogundimu’s chest rolled in a growl.

 

The gauntlet came for Genji as he lingered in a crossing of swords. Genji flipped free of the trajectory, landing a few car lengths down the street and circling back in. Oxton shot at Ogundimu, emptying tiny craters in the heavy frame of his shoulders, but he did not look for her. His gauntlet quivered microseconds too late to snatch her from the air, but he no longer committed it to the chase.

 

He watched Genji.

 

Genji diagrammed all the ways he could dissect Akande Ogundimu and have him still register as alive, for Mr. Reyes’s sake. Ogundimu dropped his head as a pistol glow burned along the left side of his headset. Genji’s trajectory metamorphosed from a curve to an angular dash at the distracted target, green light cycling off his heels. Ogundimu reared the yellow scorpion tail of his gauntlet, not any faster or better angled than before--

 

Doomfist struck the ground. Pressure popped in hollow spaces between Genji’s wires. Pavement gurgled to spongy uncertainty beneath his feet. The earth bucked up in a block, stabbing into the curve of his spine and carrying him skyward along with most of the nearby cars. One vehicle accelerated under his buckled legs, a spinning brick balloon, headlights glowing as they turned on him.

 

Something delicate cracked in the uppercut of concrete. He could not feel what it was, but his body stiffened as he drew his katana. Genji expelled a formless green thrust down the blade. Dragon teeth scaled his back, and he _felt_ those. The dragon's voice, a tinny bird-like gong, bit into his wiring instead of the air. His blade fell neatly between the door panels, and the car flew apart around him.

 

Doomfist was on the other side, golden gauntlet leading to the open sky. The fist that cut the street in half rose above Genji’s head, and punched dead on into his chest. The dragon expired out of his seams in a cloud of lightning, puffed from his shoulders in a mist lit aflame, and he shot backward.

 

Visor kept flashing distance and impact angle data whenever his head rolled at the ground. Course correction gestures came online. Genji hit concrete.

 

Hips, back, head crumpled against the street in turn. Acceleration readings cut out of triple digits after the first bounce. Rock dust clouded the world, his ribbon flapping darkly in and out of view. He fired the boost jets in his legs: only one responded, but it was enough to prop his skid from side to toes. Genji grabbed at the pavement.

 

His heels tangled on an uprooted slab of rock behind him, and his ankles cracked. The stalled pinwheel skipped off the surface of the shattered river and crashed spine-first into the door of an SUV.

 

Murky creaks of aluminum origami chewed between Genji’s ears. His visor feed stained yellow with caution boxes. Machine wailing spiraled from the voice box of the car he had been mated to. Deep-set sensors writhed under the massive pressure of a frame forcibly rearranged, pulsing especially hard against the circular lump locked in his chest. Genji hauled up one of his knees, helmet straining at the distant verves of Oxton’s chronal accelerator.

 

He tried to stand. His innards rubbed together in diamond crackles. Electricity carved dizzy clockwork around the distorted chassis holding his heart, split open his back, and buzzed out over his entire body. Green discharge circled his uselessly popped shoulder vents and he clutched a hand to his chest, sagging back into his metal cradle. His visor feed pixelated as his head tipped back against the folds of the car, but his olfactory wiring somehow remained immaculate. A potion of burnt fur, feathers, and oil saturated his processor.

 

Irregular blue stars marked Oxton’s passage around Doomfist as he landed. She blinked to each new flank as his eyes alone followed her around the street. He watched her. It was the same. Genji activated his comms, shoving his twisted, uncooperative feet at the ground.

 

Doomfist caught Oxton by her aquamarine heart. He tore it out. Lena split apart in the air, and fizzled from existence.

 

A giant screamed meters away from Genji. He propped an elbow on the car hull, scrambling for purchase, until he realized the figure charging into view was Winston. The scientist’s fur rippled red. He met Doomfist straight on, a roaring war flag of desperate bone and muscle. For his attempt at movement, Genji passed into another self-immolating electrical fire, the grate of his synthesizer heard by no one.

 

Mr. Reyes had promised him: _one day you will break._

 

He had talked about first aid, calling assistance, a bunch of other things Genji never paid attention to. One day, the opponent would not be fleeing omnics, panicked guards trying to remember how their guns worked, or spouses wrapped together in sleep. One day, someone would actually touch him.

 

Someone besides a coward with a revolver.

 

An earthquake wave dislodged him from his welt in the car door, and Genji capsized on his side. He reached for a delicate ribbon of black metal gleaming in the surrounding rubble, a single point of reference as the buildings rocked around him. His visor phased back to clarity: it was a pair of glasses, abandoned upside-down. Genji squirmed, an ineffective green tomato worm drying in the sun, ticking his thumb on the glass-frame. He swamped with a new cry of wild electricity. His hand relaxed around the discarded accessory.

 

A mountain walked over him. His body filled barely a quarter of its shadow. He did not know where his swords were. Could not feel them on his back. Genji rolled one shuriken out with a spasm of his hand, and it flopped to the ground over the uncoordinated clenches of his electrified fingers.

 

His chest moved in broken thrusts of artificial breath, faster and faster as the shape leaned forward. A huge rubbery paw pinched the glasses from the ground. Genji looked up. Winston settled the glasses over his nose. He sniffed at Genji, reached a fuzzy arm over his head, and crushed the SUV’s alarm unit.

 

Winston panted. The air throbbed with the arrival of a couple whale-shaped dropships. Birds twittered in the highest building tops. All other sound had flown from the area. Blood drooled off Winston’s chin in sloppy threads. He smiled at Genji, red-lipped, and framed his back with both paws.

 

Genji wheezed. Winston blinked at him, only to break off contact as discharge spiked across his paws from Genji’s body. The arc did not complete up his arms, unable to cross the protective gloves he used to handle the Tesla cannon. Winston swallowed.

 

“Mission…” Genji tried again while the scientist shook out his paws.

 

“It’s okay,” Winston answered as he returned to his investigation, face settling in a critical furl. “We won.” He blew out a sigh and heaved Genji off the ground. Genji snarled, the loose lightning from his veins finding the unprotected panels of Winston’s suit and poofing the fur on his head up in static patches. “Sorry,” Winston swore through his teeth, laying Genji over his shoulder. He staggered to the nearer dropship, holding one glove over the chronal accelerator harnessed on his hip.

 

Genji was arranged in one of the passenger wells, and strapped down after Winston examined his spine again. Oxton’s shattered accelerator went on the next bench over. Winston dumped Doomfist’s shattered gauntlet from his back onto the floor.

 

“Guess she wasn’t fast enough,” Genji said, head tipped at the accelerator. Winston’s yellow eyes fixed on his faceplate, pupils shrinking.

 

He snorted, smiled. Kicked the gauntlet into the wall with his heel.

 

“Keep her safe for me.” He limped back outside. Genji examined the pilot box at the top of a short staircase. It looked empty. Not a Blackwatch ship, so no sedatives available as a reward for completing the mission. Outside Winston’s deep voice jumped in surprise, and the ship bounced in its moorings, plastic interior squeaking. Genji’s visor glowed.

 

Winston lurched up the ramp with Ogundimu cupped to his shoulder, new blood shining across his nostrils. He dropped the man in a passenger well across from Genji. Pulling binders from a supply cache, he crossed Ogundimu’s arms over his chest. More restraints roped the biceps, hips, the ankles, until Doomfist was locked in a shell of steel, his unconscious head lapped forward on the rim. Winston gathered the pieces of the gauntlet off the floor and wobbled outside to the second ship.

 

Sweat and coolant patched Ogundimu from the naked crown of his skull to the folds of his red sash. Swatches of dust painted the drum of his chest. His heartbeat sped up as they sat together. Lime electricity shot through Genji’s body as he stared.

 

Winston returned, bay door shutting behind him this time. He retrieved the accelerator and sat down at a table with it, his boxy rump balanced on a dull red staff couch. Whirrs and muted machine rolls indicated the departure of the other ship. Winston remained seated, tinkering with the accelerator as the two cyborgs sparked nearby.

 

“Why are we not taking off?” Genji rattled. Winston showed him the accelerator as an answer until he got an opportunity to take the screwdriver hilt out of his mouth.

 

“Lena might not be sharing time with us, but she should still be in the local space,” he explained as he worked the accelerator open. “If I can get her equipment operational…” His mouth pursed. “Kuebiko!” he called, and Genji searched the ship again. No one there. “Does this ship have the proper broadcast equipment for the accelerator signal?”

 

A monotone answer from the pilot box:

 

“I’m not sure.”

 

“You don’t have access to all ship systems?”

 

“I do. This is embarrassing, but it’s hard to interpret the device blueprints as well as you do.” Intercom, Genji realized. “My ability to make logical connections between the accelerator mechanism and the ship components is limited.” Winston sniffed, lip curling in thought, and he scratched a nondescript black box sitting beside his tool chest. A thick wire tied the box to the wall of the ship.

 

“Well, I’m sure I can figure it out. First things first…” He huddled over the accelerator. Eventually it ticked blue, rings cycling in the center. “Great! Okay, Lena!” Winston cradled the accelerator and hobbled away to the pilot box.

 

Doomfist’s heart flooded Genji’s sensors with uneven pulses of life.

 

Brown eyes opened wide. Ogundimu stared across the meter of floorspace at Genji. The tick of his heart slowed to perfect rhythm.

 

Genji stayed still. The lightning came anyway, making a silent contortion of his whole body. Neon green bubbled from the lips of his upper vents, seeping down his sides in glowing webs. Ogundimu watched him leak. Genji glanced up the stair to the pilot box, and Ogundimu followed him, studying the lumpy shadow of the scientist at work. He licked his lips, bringing his eyes back over Genji.

 

“Despite current appearances,” he rumbled in English. “Your prosthetics have commendable quality.” Ogundimu attempted to move his locked arms, and the cage of restraints shook, but held. “It seems we will be here a while, so let’s see if they can tell me anything about you.” He searched the label _25_ on Genji’s breastplate, and moved down from there. Genji tried to stop breathing, so he leaked less. “Japanese origin seems likely,” Ogundimu thought aloud, ignoring his struggles. “Considering your choice of weapons and…” He tipped the square of his chin at the kanji stamped on Genji’s chest. “Yet I have never heard of a Japanese Overwatch agent of your particular description. Someone at our intel department must be messing around.”

 

He laughed, a deep, throbbing boom.

 

Genji’s visor dulled, head tipping to one side, fleeing the warm thunder. In movies, the voices of spirits soared from the clouds to direct heroes. Ogundimu’s voice reminded him of making out in the back row while divine interventions played out on the screen. “Your technique is interesting too. I am more of a hands-on combatant myself.” Ogundimu laughed again, a groundswell in Genji’s ears, sensors abruptly cleansed of interference. Like this was not his target who had just tried to destroy him. “But there is much to be gained when you investigate the entire wealth of martial arts. For example,” Ogundimu chuckled. “Certain families in Japan possess swordfighting lineages similar to yours. But there aren’t many of them left, and mostly, they are people with a heritage they fail to act on.”

 

Ogundimu smiled, careless and without demand. Genji shivered through another discharge, visor trained on his lips. “There is one exception. One clan that joined with my organization, hoping to make a better world.”

 

“Genji, you don’t have to listen to him, yea?” a soft, static-riddled voice spoke up at Genji’s side. Ogundimu’s smile deepened. Genji discovered Lena Oxton slumped on the bench, her shoulder budged against the border wall between them, her clothing wreathed in mud. She smiled and lifted her hand toward the gentle green of Genji’s eyeframe. “You--” Her image flickered out.

 

She reappeared, sitting straight, arm back in her lap, and she blinked at Genji. “Hey--” She vanished.

 

When she materialized again, her eyes rolled back, body falling slack against the wall. Winston lumbered down from the pilot box, glancing at Ogundimu, who remained silent. He gathered a blanket from side storage, which he spread around Oxton before strapping her in. He used his thumb to tenderly ensure her eyelids were all the way closed.

 

“I need to make sure we’re clear to our destination,” he mumbled aside to Genji as he adjusted the straps. “I want to run over the flight path one more time with Kuebiko.” He thumped back to work. The ship swallowed its landing gear and floated into the sky not long after.

 

“It would take someone of incredible strength to rise from a dragon’s jaws,” Ogundimu called once Winston was gone. Genji lowered his head against the side of the well, trying to keep watch over Oxton as she shuddered under the blanket.

 

A line of ruby gleamed down his peripheral view of Ogundimu. He looked: the trail began at the circular side unit of the other cyborg’s headgear. Ogundimu followed him to the mar, and shook his head as he caught Genji’s visor with his eyes once more. “This pain is useful,” he explained. “It is a good teacher.” The blood spotted the collar of restraints around his chest.

 

Genji’s machinery filled with storms of lightning, exposed coolant giving birth to streams of smoke, and his synthesizer fell into a groan as the light faded. “When you seek justice, I am sure your pain will have taught you just what to do,” Ogundimu said. “But I wonder-- our contact in Japan was never terribly productive after his father died, yet we heard of some interesting incidents just before he vanished. Our first thought was that he had been killed, but our resources being what they are…we soon knew the dragon had fled, and not long after that we found out exactly where.”

 

Electricity, leaping everywhere. But Genji held still. His visor fixed on the eyes of Doomfist and he leaned against the network of straps holding him to safety. He could not hear it, but his heart calmed, beating in time with the other man’s.

 

“Hanzo,” he croaked. Ogundimu nodded.

 

“And there is more. So much more. The whole world.” Ogundimu shook his head, smiling dizzily. Genji moved to the edge of his bench, hands rising to frame the walls of the well. His green light glared across the corrugate floor. “Your body is like mine,” Ogundimu invited. “Capable of constant upgrades. There is no limit to our strength.” He cracked his neck, rocking his head side-to-side as the blood dried. “And I can offer learning experiences you will never forget. All I ask is that you live as strong as you are, and help me change the world.” He grinned, white teeth and a shade of bruising. “As your father would have.”

 

“Hanzo,” Genji repeated, synthesizer no longer scratching for breath, voice deep as the green sparks cycled around his spread arms. Ogundimu’s lips wrinkled into a neutral line.

 

“I guess I could not expect Overwatch to properly nurture your ambitions. No matter. I will show you your path, my friend.” Genji tilted his head. “To Hanzo,” Ogundimu sighed. Genji shoved his chest into the straps, coolant slopping on the floor. Doomfist watched him struggle to unfasten his electrified hands from the sides of the well. “Where is the gauntlet?” he asked. Genji’s head craned at the side of the ship, toward the other flight long separated from theirs. “Very well. The rightful owner will claim it eventually.” Doomfist smirked. “How about your own strength?” He raised his shoulders, ringing his binds, and with his eyes directed Genji to an adjacent bench.

 

The swords. Winston must have retrieved them. He had even drawn seatbelts over the scabbards.

 

Ogundimu lifted his lower lip, waiting.

 

Genji stretched out his arm. He mushed the other hand at his chest, fumbling against the strap lock. Winston had fastened it so easily with his thick paws, but Genji’s plastic fingers trembled and slipped off and pressed at random, unable to find feedback in the device. “I see,” Ogundimu’s soft voice murmured inside his head as he scraped the lock open. “They have stolen your senses from you. Don’t worry.” Genji’s foot brushed the side of Oxton’s as he struggled. Sparks coalesced to wildfire in his back. His synthesizer spit up balls of static as he broke from the straps. He activated his legs to pivot his weight, but a circus of discharge blew his spine. He vaulted his back, crying out, crashing to the ground in a splatter of fluids. And all the while Doomfist spread warmth between his slender white antennae: “I will help you feel all kinds of things.”

 

Genji laid prone, milky blurs of oil spreading across his visor, green nets of lightning mushrooming out of his back and grilling the slick around him. Winston thudded down the stair from the pilot box. “Do not let the weaknesses they’ve built defeat you,” Doomfist urged. “Show me you are worthy of my teaching.” Shivering, burning, Genji clamped a hand on the seat of his weapons. He extended a couple fingers to the only familiar thing in this world, his blade.

 

“What’s going on?” Winston demanded. The swords toppled to the floor in front of Genji. He seized the katana hilt.

 

Strong paws plucked him into the air. The katana fell from his shaky grip. Genji snatched at white suit and fur, worming over Winston’s shoulder toward the sword agleam and halfway out of its sheath. Winston bellowed as another discharge arced between them.

 

Lena moaned as a trace of static traveled up her leg.

 

Genji’s head popped up at the sound. Winston looked, and stormed away from the passenger bay with the cyborg frozen over his shoulder. Genji’s visor dropped at the handfuls of white uniform crushed in his fingers, and rose toward Lena a second time.

 

“You have no time to worry about stones in the garden,” Ogundimu warned. “If you would pick the flowers.”

 

“Shut _up._ ” Winston eyed Doomfist over his shoulder. When he noticed Genji staring, he pulled him down in front of his chest, holding him in one arm while he cleared off the table. Yellow eyes searched Genji’s blank faceplate, and warm breath puffed from a bloody nose over Genji’s cracked armor.

 

Winston smiled a little. “Don’t let him goad you.” His lips pursed. “You’re in no condition to fight.” Genji drooped against the scientist’s suit, visor darkening in slow blinks. Winston sniffed at the green light uncertainly.

 

Genji raised his arm and mashed his hand into Winston’s face, pushing till his fingers caught the bridge of his glasses. He adjusted them back up Winston’s nose. Winston snorted a couple times, rubbing one bloodstained nostril with his free paw. Then he smirked at Genji.

 

He turned the cyborg over easily enough, but let go and Genji slid limply onto the table, faceplate clinking across the plastic. “Oh! Sorry!” He steadied Genji’s corpse with a paw to his back. “I would have asked Lena to help, but, you know…” Genji twisted his head to the side, watching Winston’s smile fade. Winston peeked at the light of the visor as he pulled out his tools, and cleared his throat. “It’s just like when I was younger, the others would make plans to get me in trouble. They would pick fights when they knew one of the doctors was nearby. They would, uh, call me clumsy. Schoolyard stuff. What I’m trying to say is…you can’t let them get to you.”

 

“Pathetic,” Doomfist muttered from the passenger bay. Winston’s face transformed, all shrunken pupils and long teeth as he growled at the man.

 

Genji laughed, noise cut short by electrical interference. Winston turned back, all smooth grays and inquisitive eyes again.

 

“I think I see which unit is giving you trouble. Hold still, okay?” He tucked over Genji’s back with his tools. “This definitely doesn’t belong to you,” he murmured as he set a knotted car door handle on the table beside Genji’s head. Using a field knife and a pair of tongs, Winston peeled the remnants of the gray muscle layer away from the impact point, opening Genji up from the lowest junction of his shoulderblades to the light at the base of his spine. Genji spotted his true self reflected in the ship’s silvery ceiling.

 

Winston had opened a hole. Everything was black and empty inside. When his white gloves rummaged around, machine pieces briefly silhouetted against the material, and metal chunks reflected the safety orange handles of his tools. Winston posed his fingers around a vertebra case shattered by ivory lines, broken wires growing from the fractures like hair. “Does it hurt?” he asked as he grazed one of the wires with the side of his pinky. Genji ground his cheek plate against the tabletop.

 

“I don’t feel anything.”

 

Winston frowned.

 

“That can’t be true,” he said, but resumed work. He replaced the casing with a pastel purple ring, like a little kid’s Band-Aid. Then he produced a jar of brown grease that hardened as he smeared it over the remaining wounds. “This should stabilize it until we get you back to medical. Does it feel any better?”

 

Genji planted his hands on the tabletop, scratching furrows in the plasmetal as he tried pushing his torso up. His swords shined in the corner of his visor. The ragged remains of his aesthetic covering decayed off his sides. The ship bounced through a turbulence pocket, and he clanked back onto the table, but none of his electrical channels burst from his eviscerated spine. He nodded weakly to Winston.

 

Winston hovered his paw over a blue glow emanating from the toolbox. “I designed an advanced gauze, but I want to run some more simulations first if it’s not an emergency.” He shuffled to one of the storage units. “Anyway, we did well today. You did well.” Winston humped his shoulders, pulling out a towel. “I know it doesn’t feel like it…”

 

He returned to wipe stains from Genji’s back and dry the vents. With a gentle tug of his arms, he propped Genji up on the tabletop. The swords lay askew in the middle of Genji’s visor. Winston hefted himself over the table edge.

 

That was when Genji saw it: another thick blanket, just like the one cocooning Oxton. Winston took a second to unfold it and shake out the wrinkles, then he wrapped Genji up.

 

A fluffy terrycloth sushi roll, his legs sticking out one end and his head the other. Shadow, and a pressure warning, spread across Genji’s shoulders: Winston tucked an arm around him. Genji smelled the soft laundry detergent plush of his fur. Ogundimu was staring at them.

 

Genji shimmied his hand to the top of the blanket, tweezing a couple fingers against the inner surface. Ogundimu twisted away, eyes half-lidded at the wall. Genji’s visor drifted over the swords, then the unconscious woman on the other side of the ship.

 

“Lena,” he murmured, synthesizer broadcast warped. Winston looked down at him curiously. “ _Lena,_ ” Genji hacked out.

 

“Oh.” Winston’s big nostrils contracted. “We’ve been through this before. A little rest, and she’ll be fine.” He snuffled at the top of Genji’s helmet. “I’m glad I can help amazing people like you and Lena.” Genji looked up, visor pale. Winston smiled. “And make the world better, too. With science!” Genji stuck his hand through the gap at the top of the blanket and held it to the headguard above his eyeframe. Winston muttered above him, “Sorry, that was probably embarrassing…”

 

Genji lowered his head. Winston’s massive paw relaxed on the tabletop beside him. The ship hopped through another turbulence pocket. Winston bent his stubby legs up and scratched one knee with the opposing toe. Genji shut off his visor, cutting away the image of his swords swaying on the floor of the passenger bay. He twisted his hips a few times. “Everything okay?” Winston asked. With a grunt of his synth, Genji managed to tip over into a lean against the scientist’s side. Winston’s lips mouthed out a nearly breathless _oh._ He tucked his arm inward to surround Genji, and sat back to await their arrival in Gibraltar.

 

Genji listened to the beating of Winston’s heart. It sped whenever a pang or ache fussed somewhere under his fur. But as the ship flew on, the heart slowed, briefly able to forget the pain.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are headed.  
> 
>   * ^ This may look suspiciously like the blurb from the last "Next chapter", at least until I go back and edit it. It's because I goofed again and overwrote my chapter (or specifically this part of it) so the real next chapter is Coming Soon instead of being part of this entry. At least this time I have the decency to give them different titles...right?
>   * _tabi_ \- Japanese socks with a part between the big toe and the other toes
>   * _Kuebiko_ \- Japanese god of wisdom, typically represented as a scarecrow that cannot walk
>   * We are still not canon for Uprising, but we are canon for Doomfist. And isn't that what really matters?
> 



	17. Master

 

Leave a demon in the desert to rot, and he would forget he had ever been a man. That was what he told the doctors. That was what he promised himself. He would break.

 

The desert was here. Dunes swelled out of the ground ever on the verge of toppling. Cloudless skies pulsed yellow. Earth coughed and hissed around the lightest footstep. The horizon split into the land by knife cut, and sand oscillated through the margin in an infinity of gold-white snakeskin. The desert was here, and Zenyatta was gone. _He would break._

 

Genji studied the array of his hands above his knees, thumbs and forefingers linked, legs tucked in a disciplined cross. He sat steady on a dune-top, an easy line to the sunrise. The night before he dreamed of cold lamplight on his skin as Hanzo chased him through the courtyards. After he shook away the gray blanket of sleep at 4:30, he clicked his visor off and assumed his meditation. He ignored the cataclysm pink of dawn, the ripe peaches offered in the east. When he stirred at midmorning, the balance of the land and the blue sky clarified instantly in his visor, his body sat solid beneath him, and when he exhaled, the world was silent by his side.

 

The desert was just dirt and windless air. It was sunlight running fingers along his shoulder caps, blushing warmth into red-gray padding. Genji raised his chin, allowing the heat to caress his neck cords and the hexagon cap marking his synthesizer box.

 

“Foolish.” Deep sound, short reverb in the broadcast, well humored for an admonishment. His voice. A life in a word. “You fool,” he laughed. He looked back at his long tail of footprints across the sands, his arrow home.

 

If only he had not taken so long. He could not leave this morning. He was being held hostage.

 

Genji first noticed the hunter the same night the lights of Oasis stopped shining at his back. It was not a bird he could see. Sometimes his acoustics picked up a hovering breath, or a winged silhouette grew acute in the sun. Each night he burrowed into a dune to sleep, and most mornings it took the bird time to find him again. Today it welled up in front of his perch, though none of his sensors read it in the air.

 

_docholly12: hey wanted to ask u somethng_

_karroten: Greetings McCree._

_docholly12: wow. a good mood? or idk…‘McCree’, am i in trouble?_

_karroten: I was upset actually._

_docholly12: o_

_karroten: But I made my peace with it._

_docholly12: o_

Silent laughter quivered through Genji’s suspended arms.

 

_docholly12: u still w/ mercy_

_karroten: We parted ways._

_docholly12: oops. did u ask abt Gabe?_

Genji stilled. The flying giant coughed out in the desert. Genji looked into the sun, over his head now, many-armed and unreachable until he learned to fly.

 

_karroten: She does not have the body._

_docholly12: says who??_

_karroten: I am sure. Angela does not have an interest in anything like that anymore._

_docholly12: WTF u aint the most reliable source! u didn’t even ask?!_

_karroten: She would not steal him from you._

_**SYSTEM MESSAGE**: docholly12 is now [OFFLINE]._

 

His visor clouded, the rings across his armor losing their light. The eastern horizon rippled in front of him, pixelating its perfect kiss to the dunes. Camouflage holograms shed in waves from the bird’s arched wings. It hovered on the desert floor below his meditation site.

 

“You look familiar,” Genji told it. Red ribs crooked out of black wings, bloody LEDs pulsated in marches across the hull. The ship lilted side-to-side like a hummingbird in a spider web, nose scrying up at him on a puff of magenta jets. A jawline of long-pipe machine guns fixed on his head.

 

After the naked target on the fragile mountaintop showed no response to the heavy caliber threat, the skeleton ship creaked down to the sand, tentative for such a large object. A broad runway burst out of the stomach, emptying armored men on the sand. Pink-eyed skulls with gas filters swelling on the jaws twisted toward Genji. Talon claws tattooed each soldier’s brow. The ship guns settled low with a clunk, not a single soul left behind to aim.

 

One soldier positioned himself on the tip of the phalanx, resting a gray glove on his rifle strap to restrain the weapon. Genji remained in his meditation pose.

 

“I am Marchand,” the man called to him in oozing English. “And you are Shimada. All of Talon knows your name.”

 

“Just that name?” Genji wondered.

 

“The name of a dragon that went missing from our council.” Marchand’s ruby eyeholes gleamed at him. “I want you to know I am the reason no one has fired.” He threw his shoulders back. “I am the one who proposed you were not just an animal, that you could be reasoned with-- even after you cut our comrade down.”

 

“You were at the hospital.” Genji scanned the ship ramp. “Is the blue woman with you?”

 

“Neither of them are here,” Marchand snorted through his mask. “I told you, this is my ambition.” He looked around at the rest of his toy soldiers, seeking encouragement from their glowing sockets. “Reuniting the clan with Talon has been an organization-wide dream. If I am successful--”

 

“If I am the Shimada you think,” Genji interrupted, brightening gleefully. “You should offer me clothing and girls!” It was hard to spot Marchand tensing under his body armor. All of the soldiers dressed thickly despite the Iraqi desert. Genji’s secondary cooling whistled through the gill slashes on his torso in sympathy.

 

“That cannot be,” Marchand bleated, tone acquiring shades of outraged grandpa. “Your ideals must have matured from…that!” His voice rolled husky through the mask filters, “Your father never joined us for the sake of material pleasures!”

 

“You must have known him so well.” Genji’s posture did not change. Marchand was begging to a statue, and now it had gone silent. The soldier shifted his weight. The others looked at him, a few angling their rifles higher off their hips. Marchand thrust out his arm to warn them back-- “I cannot accept your offer,” Genji said. The Talon men turned at him. “If you had not been so timid about making contact, you might have caught me before I realized...”

 

“We had to be sure we evaded the Oasis security net,” Marchand muttered.

 

“I understand. But now I find myself looking for someone,” Genji said. Marchand’s rifle jumped up out of sheer excitement.

 

“Your brother!” he answered. Genji’s visor glowed. “We know where he is right now. Come with me, I will take you to him.” Marchand lifted the open palm of his glove.

 

Genji laughed.

 

“Will we destroy some more hospitals on the way back from murdering Hanzo?”

 

The fingers of Marchand’s offer coiled inward.

 

“I realize you will require more information to grasp how we are trying to better the world,” he grumped.

 

“Will you teach me?” Genji’s lights saturated with neon, Talon soldiers almost erased from view as he addressed the sun. “My teacher is the one I seek, not Brother.” Marchand glanced at the others, and retreated from his prostrations at the base of the dune. The crawling movement drew Genji’s solid, unflickering gaze. He followed Marchand’s lead and checked the other men, noting their configuration, assembling targeting outlines over their bodies, processing system feedback on potential firing angles and escape vectors. “Your presence here has cleared my path, but all I have done is waste your time,” he hummed. “I am thinking that as an apology, I will let you go with your lives, if you want them. Even if you are dangerous to this world.”

 

Marchand’s stiff fingers dug at the seams of his rifle barrel.

 

“What about your honor?” he pitched.

 

“I am stripped away,” Genji said, bowing his head. He turned his arms out wider, hands still delicately arranged in mudras. “Look at me,” he chuckled. “You can see I have done nothing worth honoring my whole life. Hanzo took nothing--” He hesitated, and the skull nose of Marchand’s helmet cocked at him, hound after cat. “He took nothing of my honor.”

 

“I hear the pain in your voice,” Marchand barked. “You hide behind your words.”

 

“I am not very good at expressing myself,” Genji admitted. His synth warmed: “But my teacher will show me.”

 

“Who is your teacher?”

 

The sea of demon eyes leered at Genji.

 

“If you still desire your lives, you should leave now,” he answered. He uncrossed his legs, abandoned the poses of his hands and rose, sliding his fingers across the katana stem. Marchand motioned the others to level their rifles.

 

“There are uses for you, willing or not,” the Talon soldier told him. “Alive or not.”

 

Fingers tugged at triggers. Genji leaped into the sun, armored in light. Spatters and clacks of rising bullets filled his wake, muffling into the flank of the dune. Skulls tracked higher. Genji followed the shiny ticks of rising rifle muzzles. He flipped forward, flying above the bullets committed to his shrine in the sky.

 

He spread his arms. The guns sang at the sun. Genji fell through the gaps in the bullets, green lightning slowing off his ankles as his toes landed on the angles of Marchand’s collarbone. His katana descended through the nose of Marchand’s helmet, curving out the back side into the sand.

 

Marchand was bigger up close. Genji perched on him in the dead center of the soldiers, hunkering to his impaled blade as the body shifted under his feet. Marchand bent over backwards to accommodate the katana, but had yet to fully topple.

 

Another man scampered forward, almost bow-legged in his attempt to create an angle that put the sun at Genji’s back and not his allies. Genji unsheathed the blade from Marchand and collapsed to the sand with him, bending one knee and stretching the other leg to frame himself across the ground as he switched weapons. His wakizashi snaked through the belly and up the ribcage of the ambitious opponent, piercing his heart.

 

The remaining soldiers retreated from Genji’s back, reducing their spread to an efficient crescent. Genji pulled his sword free, the man in his clutches blinking as he exsanguinated in a gush across his hunched, angular killer. Genji shook off the wakizashi as he turned to the others, the body crumpling behind him.

 

“Good,” he snarled at their formation. Talon trained well. They simply were not fast enough. They obeyed rules set by guns. Genji deflected their shots back into their heads.

 

One soldier remained, because he had not fired and instead ran for the ship ramp. Genji uncoiled from his low surveillance of the corpses, shining sword level with his chest. The soldier yelled French into the belly of the ship. His voice echoed deeper than Marchand’s, even if they both screamed through masks.

 

Genji flew over him. The wakizashi nailed to the crux of his throat and scraped sideways. Sparks exploded beneath the blade. A rifle muzzle knocked Genji’s stomach, only to slip across his wet abdominal plate and jut into the gap between his side and arm before firing. Genji snapped his leg forward and kicked down on the sword, driving it through the soldier’s neck to lodge in the ramp grate.

 

The rifle blasted at the indifferent desert until empty. The body slumped away in a streak of black, head rolling to one side. Genji steadied the helmet with a touch, and pulled off the front of the mask to be sure.

 

Omnic lights sputtered out beneath him.

 

He released the head off the side of the ramp and surveyed the mouth of the ship. Gears turned over within the metal belly, the cabin growled with ambient grinds of air conditioning. Music slithered out of the pilot box, too soft for human ears, full of harp chords and angel choirs.

 

_Et tout change, et tout est pareil_

_Le bonheur n'est pas le nôtre_

Wakizashi dribbling down his leg, Genji walked inside.

 

No pilot. The omnic had not been calling for back-up. Red overheads blew across Genji’s armor as he crossed the threshold. After searching both ends of the ship he entered the passenger bay, a dozen empty metal wells framing his moist silhouette. He tipped open the lids of boxes on the shelves, and glanced under the well benches. An _ISAIAH_ rocket launcher was the only weapon left on the rack. He moved to the pilot box, circling the empty black chairs and scouring the dashboard.

 

_L'amour n'est pas cette misère_

_L'amour, c'est toi entre mes bras_

The blue woman lay across the holographic comms screen. Past her shoulder, a tall, thin window conveyed a sky dark enough to spot the River of Heaven. Her pinkish robe opened around her torso, films of silk teasing the frame of her ribs. Light from the comms glared off the drained skin of her arm hanging across her face. A dismembered headphone and dots of something dark riddled the cushions beside her limp hand, the other bud cozied in her ear. Gurgling breaths muddied the empty headphone’s broadcast, but the woman’s naked chest did not move. One amber eye was misted over above the tattooed bones of her wrist.

 

_Et comme ceux qui s'aimeront_

_Après nous_

Her eye lurched wetly toward Genji. Only after several seconds did the pupil in the center grow small and focused. She retracted her arm from its lifeless splay as the final harp notes stung their ears, and ran her hand through the undone azure of her hair, sitting up on her elbow. The robe hung off her like a shed skin. Shiny wounds extended the corner of her lip up to her ear. She unlocked a phone on the cushion and hit the replay button. The song began again.

 

The wheezing behind the music deepened, garbling most of the lyrics. The blue woman’s side lifted for the first time since Genji started watching. He framed his hand against the ship dashboard, unwilling to pair with it even if just to confirm an audio desync. There was nothing he could do about the blue woman from here.

 

“Are you having trouble breathing?” he asked, leaning at the intercom, uncertain if she would hear over her music. Her static, unblinking eyes traveled down his body, drawing to the red line of his sword. She smiled. The hissing breaths in her room dropped into bony, breathless gulps, then splintered into meaty coughing. She pulled out her other headphone and twisted away from the camera, moving her arm over something in the dark. The camera failed to render anything but bludgeoned black pixels. “Your soldiers…” Genji prompted.

 

Her face tipped up in profile at him, spat out a word:

 

“ _Sot._ ”

 

She stuck a hand out to the holo interface and tapped a button, then turned back to the darkness as the screen shut off. The ship lights cycled brighter. Metal whining engulfed the hull. Genji glanced around the cabin, only to hear the gut cylinders vent as the exit ramp wheeled in. He scrambled out, ducking into a slide to make the closing partition. The black ship croaked over his head after he dropped to the ground.

 

Genji ran over the bodies to the dune, hopping up its face, skirting over the peak in a flash of neon. The dropship exploded, knocking the tower of sand over on top of him, familiar to the last.

 

Night settled in by the time he wriggled free of the earthen tonnage. His body was brown with dried blood and embedded patches of sand. Genji blasted his vents clear as he sat on his knees. The stars quavered overhead, huge and wobbling as smoke filtered their distant ghosts.

 

He turned away from the wreckage and traveled west. He would wash off in the artificial lakes of Oasis. It was on his way, and no one would notice a little red in all that water.

 

* * *

 

A black flag seeped through the sky, boiling from a hole that had been a hospital. Genji followed handmade signs down a street veined by shatter marks. He located the triage camp in a plaza of ashen pavement, broken statues poking alabaster between the tent tops. Acacias withered on the outskirts, their irrigation pipes beheaded in the explosion. Iron fences wreathed the triage tents, a clamshell of news vans nosed up to the chainlink.

 

When he found Angela, she was writing another letter. She glanced up at him, her face immaculate, absolved of even the smallest red dash or unbalancing scar. Genji retreated a step from the exacting blue of her eyes. Angela knelt back over the stationary and finished her sentence. Before she could speak, a nurse pushed through the tent flap and bent to her ear. She touched Genji’s shoulder as she whisked outside.

 

He helped himself to a chair at her plastic field desk. He did not recognize the man’s name on the letter envelope, or any of the address aside from the country: Mexico. Acidic perfumes from wet metal tools and inflamed lances of pill powder and rot leaked through the tent flaps. Genji focused on configuring his left hand into different mudras and reciting poetry in his head. All that came to mind was _L'amour n'est pas cette misère_. His indicator lights blanched, grazing yellow.

 

A wind chime rang at his side.

 

Genji jumped, visor sweeping Angela’s office. She owned a spinner made of beads and scraps of foil, a child’s crayon drawing of her floating the tail. It hung in the wrong place to take advantage of the wind, and did not move or sing. Genji tied it to a different pole, and it squeaked whenever the air and its smells passed in. He listened to the brays of tinfoil, then turned away.

 

Angela’s cot lay directly behind her desk, a tent flap sewn tight behind it. Genji rubbed the top tie, eyeing the sun beyond the tent wall, ultimately dropping to his knees and investigating the more outlandish option of Zenyatta stored under the cot frame.

 

A couple boxes resided beneath the bed, one thin and pink and cleverly taped to the underside of the mattress. The other was an old-fashioned wooden crate. Genji tipped his head the pink box, wondering at the thick tape holding it up, tabs wrinkled and loose from repeat usage. He slipped his hand past the web and hauled the crate out to the tips of his knees.

 

Half-hidden under a scrap of linen, a carved Shambali sphere was the crate’s only contents. Genji pulled away the fabric. The sphere lay inert, and when he touched it, silent.

 

He sketched the pad of his thumb across the engravings, probing Zenyatta’s tiniest errors, shallow chisel divots and incidental scratches. His fingers slid rings around the furrows where the caps would pop off and issue energy. They were cold. Angela’s nursing slippers laced the concrete outside the tent. Genji lifted the sphere from its resting place as she strode in, her doctor’s coat dyed tan and ash. It took her a moment to place him, on his knees behind the desk with the omnic device held centimeters from his face. Her eyes flicked to the belly of the cot, pink in her cheeks.

 

“I forgot already,” she sighed, removing the rustling spinner from the tent pole nearest the door and restoring it to its original silent position. She joined Genji at the bedside. “How curious you are.” She sat down on the cot, pulling off her gloves and scoring a perfect basket over Genji’s head into the wastebin beside her desk. Angela leaned on her bare hands and lifted her face toward the sunlight folded in the canvas ceiling.

 

“You need a nap?” Genji critiqued. It was a little past noon.

 

“Sometimes I have a seat here and imagine such things.”

 

“Sleep is very important,” he insisted.

 

“You sound like him,” Angela smiled. “I know. It is a little different for a doctor, especially if she is on-duty. We train to be efficient for a very long time.” She made a milky fist.

 

“That sounds difficult,” Genji muttered. He pointed at her. “Don’t push it.” Angela rocked upright, her eyes widening up and down his faceplate like there was something to see. She laughed in an uncontrolled breathy escape. Genji rolled the sphere in his palm. “He’s not dead, right?” His visor fixed on her.

 

“No!” She frowned, folding her hand under the neck of her shirt and drawing out a short chain and cross hanging beneath it. “Of course not.”

 

“Okay,” Genji allowed. “I was just wondering.” He tapped the sphere. “It’s freezing.”

 

“I’m surprised you can even pick it up, it’s so heavy,” she murmured, thumbing the arms of her cross.

 

“Really?” He tossed the sphere up in the air, and caught it with both hands. Angela’s eyebrows dug together.

 

“He knew you would return,” she decided to resume her original tack. “But I sent him away a few days ago.”

 

“I don’t understand.”

 

She turned the cross in little circles between her fingertips.

 

“Someone tried to kidnap him,” she said. Genji clawed into the sphere furrows.

 

“Who? Who took him?” he begged, rising to his feet. His synth cooled, “Talon?”

 

“A family, Genji,” Angela answered, holding up her hand. Genji wilted, cocksure spread of his shoulders breaking into a shudder. “Just a family from here in the city.” He shook his head at her. “We try to keep everything confidential, but sometimes…” Angela lifted her shoulders helplessly. “Patients find it therapeutic to chronicle their recovery on social feeds. Video of him, some of the things he did for people, made its way onto the Net. The media started running reports. The family must have seen one of them, and they-- please don’t be angry Genji,” she warned as he sized up the tent exits.

 

“Humans think they can do whatever they want with omnics,” he hissed.

 

“They had a little boy who was very sick,” Angela said, and he looked sharply at her. “They could not afford travel to Oasis, and they were afraid for their child. I’m not sure it would matter if Zenyatta was human. You see a miracle, and you want to keep it with you forever.” Her blue eyes watered at the corners. “He stopped them. He convinced them to bring the boy here, though these facilities ended up being of little use. Of all the times to acquire a novel infection, it was right after the attack…”

 

Genji tilted his head. “Zenyatta saved him,” Angela swallowed. “Everything was alright. It was just-- they had a gun.” She chuckled, an escaping flight of doves. “I’m not even sure it was loaded. But I realized there would be more like them. I can’t trust the media to stop running reports, or patients to stop recording him on their phones. And if someone used a weapon here, it is not just him who would be in danger.”

 

She shut her eyes, clasping her hands together in her lap. “He left the device for you. I do not know how it will help. Please, forgive me.”

 

Genji weighted the mattress at her side. Rocking the sphere to the crook of his elbow, he embraced her.

 

“As always, Angela, you have done nothing wrong.”

 

She glanced under her eyelashes at the chrome blade of his faceplate beside her cheek. “Where does that family live?” Genji asked, and her eyes opened wider. “Maybe Zen went to check up on them,” he suggested, tone light, possibly an attempt at being casual. Angela shifted her arm beneath his gentle hold, finding her cross.

 

“I am sure he has no need for follow-ups, Genji.” Her voice thickened, “You didn’t see it.” She traced the gleams of light showing through the tent flap. “I didn’t have enough observation time. I can’t explain it. But it was like something wondrous entered this world. If I had known such a thing existed earlier…” Genji tilted his head.

 

“I guess dragons are old news by now,” he offered, miming a snapping mouth with his artificial hand.

 

“Shh,” she chided with a grin. “But you must be excited, to have someone so much like you at your side.”

 

“Like me?”

 

“Well, not exactly.” She sniffed, clearing her throat of the wanton enthusiasm. “I will have to work harder,” she thought. “I can’t have him putting me out of business.”

 

“Never,” Genji teased her. “Zenyatta cannot bring the dead back to life!”

 

* * *

 

_docholly12: what happened isn’t your fault_

Jesse did not say anything else, but his contact ID was available again in Genji’s list.

 

Local news feeds were mostly in Arabic. Genji fished for photos of the kidnappers. Beside one picture of Zenyatta bright with surprise as he looked into the camera, there was another of parents, grandparents, and a boy. Image searching their faces led him to an English interview, and another photo: the family in front of a drooping fence, half a street sign in view. Genji could not read the text, but he stayed within walking distance of the triage camp and the black halo of the hospital, and compared the image to every sign he came across.

 

The street was narrow, boxed at one side by three-story rubble piles, and on the other by a cemetery. The older graves glistered with shrines, dirty glass roofs, crypt hollows painted brilliant blue like the inside of Zenyatta’s eye-lights. Small tombstones marked more recent burials, sometimes just an ordinary rock at the head of a mound. None of the graves had flowers, but some had round black bags or squares of cloth. Terminal dates clustered in the 2030s.

 

In the next partition down rested the most ancient crypts. Sandstone tombs faded of all identity aligned in symmetric rows. Poorer headstones sheltered from the wind along the tomb walls, forming bleached jots of fencing. Up ahead the road ended in a sign promising construction and a years-old billboard with concept art of a shopping center. Genji wondered if he had misinterpreted the street name.

 

The cemetery’s far west gate stood open at the corner, a pale blue van parked in front of it. The jaw of the van cropped over the curb. Its hoverjet wells were armored.

 

Genji had seen the same type of van around the hospital site. He ventured closer to examine this one: blacked out windows, more armor on the hood and front grill. The vee and diamond of the Vishkar Corporation perched above the left rear jet well.

 

Scratchy wails aired over the cemetery hilltop. The omnic sphere twisted against Genji’s chest. He rubbed a couple fingers across the top of it, looking up the mountain of crypts. Chatter rang along the hillside. A man boomed laughter. The wailing ended in breathless giggles of toddlers playing tag. On the hilltop, a woman appeared in a paneled cream and purple uniform, her eyes dark behind the orange panes of a visor.

 

Vishkar. Like Ran and Jun, or Angela’s bodyguards in the mansion. This Vishkar had a vantage over the entire town from her position, but she ignored all of it for a hologram in her hand. She paced, burying herself in the tiny electronic image. More laughter bubbled out of the graves behind her. Genji shrank behind the base of a flagpole until the Vishkar moved away. He bowed for his intrusion, and let himself through the wind-warped cemetery gate.

 

Small black birds watched him from the shade of broken roofs and walls as he flitted through the crypts to a less obvious approach. He toed over the shabbier graves on the east side of the rise, and leaned around a decayed monument to survey the hilltop.

 

Clotheslines hung between crypt walls. Chickens and rabbits patrolled and fertilized garden rows at the base of a huge glass memorial hut. One of the chickens was turned over a fire. More Vishkar patrolled the area. Between lines of colored pennants, a lassoed phone emitted shrunken, drumless pop. A boy sat on a small, round gravestone, an old man on a stool behind him, holding him still as a Vishkar drew his blood. Pink-faced, holding his arm over his mouth, the boy blinked tears at the Vishkar. Genji recognized him from the news feeds: the sick boy. Some kind of nanobiotic infection, per the interview. He wore a faded green t-shirt with a frog on it and the ragged strings of shorts. Once the Vishkar let him go, he jumped up and ran to a group of children playing with handicraft toys at the other side of the hill.

 

The Vishkar secured the sample vial. He handed the old man a jangling pouch, which the old man bowed his head for and mumbled gratitude. A couple leaned out of the hut doorway-- the kidnappers, the sick boy’s parents. When they left the door to join the old man at the gravestone, Genji scanned the crypt interior: a single excavated room, and no Zenyatta. The boy’s father accepted the pouch tearfully. Their Vishkar attendant eyed the exchange with nostrils wrinkled in distaste, then waved a couple others over as he loaded the sample in an analysis box. A hologram sprang off his glove, and three Vishkar pushed their faces up to the light.

 

After a minute, the expressions either scowled or pouted in boredom.

 

Most of the other Vishkar did not appear involved in the test. They were sizing up the crypts and converted homes belonging to the raggedy people of the hilltop. The woman from before strolled over to Genji’s side of the hill, still nose-first in the hologram spinning over her palm. She glanced at the large family tomb he was crouching behind, golden equations rippling across her visor glass. Genji scrunched lower against the back wall. He peeked out at the white headset band latched over her hair, and at the silver metal snapped around her arm.

 

The Vishkar’s hologram dissipated and her arms slipped apart, silhouette transforming from corporate avatar to a fluid, athletic canvas. The cream in her nail polish wove across the air, her shadow winging over the tombstones. Her shining hand rose to the sky. Genji brightened as her fingers met in a graceful mudra.

 

She extended her arm along the cardinal axis to the other side of the hill, and traced her foot up the side of her leg to balance the gesture. The Vishkar turned, frictionless, as if she was not even connected to the world. Genji wrapped his fingers around the side of the tomb.

 

Teal light pulsed up the mortar beneath him. Laser capillaries streamed off the brick into his hand, lighting up his whole arm, reaching for his head-- and the warmth in Genji’s visor cleared as he leaped backward. He bent a hand full of shuriken across his chest, exposed but outside the veil of stars rising from the earth.

 

Angela had told him something strange about the Vishkar on their final day in Oasis. She hired them twice, yet she instructed him never to follow-up with the Yuharas. Never send them data. File everything through Oberon instead.

 

She never said why.

 

Beams of light netted together into a mesh of symmetrical turquoise dragon scales around the tomb, precisely square-- a cage. Genji snaked lower to the reeds as the summoned light echoed across his faceplate. He reached out to test the solidity of the riverine wall.

 

His hand passed through. The Vishkar wrote aerial tapestries with her fingers, spinning calmly against the black smoke in the sky. Her arms ascended, and the energy with them: pylons of hardlight soared from all corners of the hilltop, linking together into a tower. Venting systems, sections of plumbing, and internal hallways wove in and out of view. Rooms rearranged by the hundreds overhead. Not a cage, but a blueprint.

 

Genji retracted his claws. The light of creation flowed across the inhabited tombs and ragged people. The other Vishkar turned from their various activities to clap bloodlessly. Children laughed, holding up their arms to catch the falling diamonds of discarded designs.

 

The tower map twinkled and vanished. Genji poked out of his crouch. The Vishkar stared past the tomb at him. He ducked away, hiding behind another of the primeval mausoleums. She did not follow. He listened to the retreating pats of her wedge heels in the sand, and to the sound of her breath-- which did not rise to tell anyone about him.

 

He crawled down the hill to the gate, straightening as he hit the curb. The kidnappers did not have anywhere to hide a monk in their single-room hut. And the Vishkar…he looked into the blacked out windows of the van. None of his visual filters pierced the tinted glass. Genji approached the side of the vehicle. The armor kept his acoustics out. If Zenyatta was locked on the other side, he would never know, not without breaking in. If he touched the window, he could guess the force required. He extended his hand.

 

“I find that course of action extremely inadvisable.”

 

The Vishkar let herself down the cemetery path to him. She hoisted an object in her right hand, an arcade claw with LED eyes jeweling the base. English was her language of choice. Maybe she did not know Arabic. Maybe she knew he was an outcast here too. Genji lowered his hand. How quickly could he reach his wakizashi and deflect whatever sort of bullet emerged from those slowly spinning claw arms? How many of the strange corporate agents would pursue if he left a body?

 

He thought of the Vishkar dancing on the hilltop, guiding the light with her hands.

 

Securing the omnic sphere against his chest, Genji turned around and surrendered with his free arm. The Vishkar glanced at his upheld palm, then glared directly into his visor as she walked up to him. She leveled the claw at his chest. “Please explain your purpose in secretly observing Vishkar activities,” she demanded.

 

“I am looking for my friend.” Genji peered at the weapon, which was humming lightly.

 

“The omnic?” the Vishkar surmised. Genji nodded. “He is not at this location. We are also searching for him.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Please state your name clearly for our records.” She opened her gunmetal gray hand, and a hologram waveform manifested yellow off the tips of her fingers.

 

“Genji,” he answered softly. The waveform rippled, imaging his synthetic voice. The woman pressed her glossy lips together, nodding at him. “Tekhartha Genji,” he elaborated. She closed her hand and lifted the claw higher up his chest.

 

“That seems unlikely. You are not wearing appropriate attire for the Shambali order, and our database only lists sixteen extranational human adherents that have undergone ordaining rights, all of whom currently reside at the monastery. Why do you lie to me regarding your identity?”

 

“You do not think I am a robot?” Genji wagged the fingers of his raised hand a couple times. “You are very observant!”

 

“There are no laws in this country prescribing treatment of machines that are not properly coded employees of a corporation or government entity. If you were an omnic, it would be significantly less hassle to simply allow you to touch the window,” she said. Genji looked over his shoulder at the proximal pane of black glass, and shimmied out from between her and the van. She tracked him with the claw. The wind picked up. He listened to the papery flaps echoing down the cemetery flagpole.

 

“You saved me only because I am human, then,” he murmured.

 

“Do not be ridiculous,” the Vishkar countered. Genji’s lights flushed. “I observed you are holding a device that belongs to the subject of our search.” She raised a trim black eyebrow at him. “It would have been unwise to damage it.” He dropped his head, lights dulling. “It is possible you are a fanatic who has named yourself a Shambali adherent without following the appropriate pilgrimage.” She frowned. “The omnic responsible for the child’s recovery dresses similarly, but not accurately, to Shambali code. He may be of similar delusion.”

 

They both looked down into the dark trailways of the omnic sphere. Genji retreated a couple steps. The Vishkar’s frown tightened.

 

“I did not mean to disturb you,” he apologized with a reflexive blink of his visor. “Whatever it is you are doing in a cemetery.”

 

“Reconstruction,” she answered with confidence. “This city’s own attempts at stepping into the future have failed disastrously. We have been contracted to efficiently convert what remains into a top class workplace. And residence.”

 

Genji squeezed the sphere to his chest.

 

“‘A better world’?” he asked in a dry chuckle, quoting the last person who tried. The Vishkar’s face blanked.

 

“A more appropriate one,” she answered after a moment, and twisted her head toward the hill of tombstones. Genji followed her eyes.

 

“I hope you do not anger any ghosts,” he said, putting another couple steps between them. “I have heard there are some feisty ones around here.”

 

“I do not appreciate your humor.” The Vishkar faced him. She shook her head. “Your first statement was correct. This city will be part of a better world.” When Genji did not respond, she grimaced, and cut off the distance between them. Genji sighed as the claw came to rest against the sphere hugged in his arms.

 

“I thought it was beautiful,” he said. Her eyes narrowed at him. “What you did.” He held out his hand and her claw veered toward it. Genji formed the mudra she used to raise the tower from the earth. “I just wish it was not here.”

 

“These are ruins. They are hundreds of years old,” the Vishkar scoffed. Genji eased back as she appraised the cemetery again. “They are better served by preservation of their most notable artifacts in an appropriately sized historical center. As it is, the local people are forced to live here as their city crumbles around them. Entire generations are raised under the stigma of being sacrilegious, for the sake of corpses! There is no reason for them to live this way, they are innocent.” She looked to the hilltop. “This world is wrong.”

 

“Are there any graveyards where you come from?” Genji asked. The Vishkar’s claw weapon dipped. “I am going to go now, if what you say is true.” His voice rose, matching the firmness of hers, “And my friend is not here.” Her lips compressed into a pout.

 

“My reporting is accurate. My personnel index is AD1549280, if you ever wish to file a complaint otherwise,” she insisted. Genji chuckled. Her eyes fixed on him, bright and strong and…irritated. “Satya,” she added.

 

“Do you know the Yuharas?” he wondered. “They work for Vishkar.”

 

“The Corporation employs over three million personnel,” she lectured, exasperation a fishline in her throat. “Do you know their index codes?”

 

“Sorry.” Genji shook his head.

 

“Please wait,” Satya sighed. She approached the van. “You constitute a valuable contact in our search…” With a gesture of her metallic arm, she leveled the van off the curb. The rear hardlight door flicked apart at her touch. Several layers of automated turrets with laser-emitting spikes panned back and forth inside. Satya picked a white-shelled drone off the equipment rack. “Forty-eight hours of surveillance on your activities should prove enlightening. Relinquish the omnic device and take...”

 

She turned to the empty sidewalk, drone activating in her hand with drowsy blue blinks of its lens. Her quick check of the nearest shady alleys did not yield any results. The drone greeted her with a beep, extending turquoise wings from its hull and flittering into the air. Both of them looked around the street one more time.

 

The wind pushed the drone around, and Satya caught it in her palm. She tickled the top of its head, and then she locked it back on the equipment rack, where it deactivated.

 

Genji flattened to his roost atop the flagpole, scanning the van interior several additional times until Satya shut the door. The red and black lines of the flag billowed around his silhouette. As the Vishkar returned to her work on the hilltop, he leaped across the street and disappeared through the rubble of bombed out apartments and abandoned houses.

 

* * *

 

Zenyatta said the world was beautiful. What parts of it did he love most?

 

Genji parsed the borders of the landscaped neighborhood where Angela lived before, flinching as sprinklers went off on lawns behind walls. Pesticides oiled the shining water. He tried a children’s park, dry but well-maintained, full of migrating butterflies and purple-white Vishkar. Scooting down an alleyway, he climbed the wall of their old hotel. The lights of OASIS reflected across his body and the plasmetal bricks. The roof at the top was empty, but he sat down to watch storms of heat lightning gather in the sunset.

 

Rain never came to the town. Ashes from the hospital plume blacked the rooftop, and Genji scurried away when a bellhop emerged from the fire escape with a broom. In the night he hunted the municipal water source, imagining a river, discovering it was aquifer, all underground and capped by a gigantic treatment plant.

 

He stood in front of the perimeter fence. Even as he searched for gaps in the chainlink, he realized his mistake: these were not Zenyatta’s dreams. The omnic sphere chimed in the cradle of his arm. Genji bent his head against it.

 

“You tease.”

 

The wind squalled around him, ringing the fence in waves. Genji rested his faceplate against the diamond chains.

 

A blue spotlight appeared on him, Zenyatta’s color. Fence shadows crisscrossed over his faceplate. Genji brightened in reply, raising his head. The light was as wide across as his chest, staring at him from the wall of the water plant’s storage tower. Tiny indicators haloed the central beam, a full moon wreathed in stars. Pipes reared from the base of the tower and flowed toward the fence. A shutter lens coiled across the light. Genji activated his nightvision.

 

It was a squid. One of its ten arms had been torn off. The stump moved, but failed to catch the squid’s bodyweight as the tapering missile of its body dismounted from the storage tower. It clocked on its side with a pressure-dropping warble, then shuffled forward and mushed its body to the other side of the fence from Genji. Unpatched bullet holes and flakes of missing paint textured its rocking carapace. It was as tall as three Bastions standing on each other’s shoulders, taller than the barrier between them, but it crumpled feebly against the chainlink. Text stamped over its carousel of lights read _SECURITY_ in English and Arabic.

 

Translucent wires bristled out of the squid’s segmented cabling and reached for Genji. He hopped backward from the fence. The squid blinked at him, wheel-sized lens adjusting with audible whirrs. It crossed two arms in front of its body to make an _X_ and broadcast an elephantine beep _._ Genji nodded. “Sorry.”

 

It slouched against the fence. Genji searched the nearby streets of the industrial sector uncertainly: warehouse frames and toxic dust. The squid lifted an arm, and light channeled into the pincer tip like a bloom of blue plankton. Very carefully, it poked the pincer through a gap in the chain, and pointed right.

 

A water fountain stood a meter away beside a bench. Genji looked at the squid. It pointed again. He walked over and depressed the fountain lever. Nothing came out. The squid’s lights rippled. A thick arm surged over the barbed fence-top and tapped the lever, then knocked the side of the fountain with a balled tentacle and tapped the lever again, to no result. The squid withdrew to its side of the fence, arms twitching. It waddled off to the storage tower.

 

Genji neared the fence, a flutter in his visor as he watched the squid lump across the concrete. When it returned, a tentacle slid over the fence and down to Genji. Its pincer held a styrofoam cup full of water. When he accepted the gift, the squid squelched contentedly. Genji held the cup under his solid chrome faceplate, the green of him reflecting on the water.

 

A lustrous tentacle pointed to the sky. “I don’t think it will rain,” Genji said, but looked anyway. The squid gestured at the fan of smoke blocking the stars. “People destroyed the hospital,” he answered, quieter. The squid’s arm sank, its bronze bulk gurgling. Genji blinked into the water cup. “Have you seen…?” He caught himself. The squid dialed in its lens shutter.

 

With the water in one hand and the omnic sphere in the other, Genji had no arms free. He stepped toward the tentacles piled against the fence, and touched his faceplate to the chain. An arm attenuated toward him right away, a sheen of iridescent wire pouring out. The squid made contact with the lines of his mask, circling up his antennae. Their lights darkened in a unified blink.

 

He needed to broadcast an image of Zenyatta. The one that jumped online was his view of Zenyatta reaching for him as he fell to his knees, the sun cresting behind the monk’s silver head. Zenyatta caught him, speaking to him with warm blue flashes of his array, but Genji did not pass on the audio.

 

_karroten: Have you seen him?_

The squid rumbled, transmitting a string of numbers and a video feed of solid beige. Genji’s visor pulsed dully. He relaxed against the fence, face mummified in translucent sensors. “I am a little lost,” he admitted. “Maybe I should have just gone to bed.” He extracted his head and migrated to the backside of the bench beside the water fountain.

 

The squid watched him set the water cup on the sidewalk. Genji crossed his legs and took a seat, a short gap left between his body and the fence, omnic sphere in his lap. “This should be good enough?” he asked the squid, its reply a subterranean whistle. Genji released the catches of his faceplate, and picked up the cup. He worried his lips together a few times, running his tongue out to the corner of his mouth. He sipped from the cup.

 

Clean, and cold enough to lift his shoulders. He swallowed, depositing the empty cup to the pavement beside his empty mask. “Goodnight,” he muttered.

 

The squid sat up from its resting place and hooted. Genji raised his scrappy eyebrows at it. It reached through the fence and grabbed the cup, stuffing the waste down a disposal compartment. Without his visor on, its body was no more than lights. It pinged and sloughed down the fence a few steps, then waved a glowing cable at him.

 

He fit his faceplate back on and followed, glancing around the empty streets. The squid’s path took him down a driveway on the side of the plant. The pavement stopped at a dead end filled with weeds.

 

The squid invited him to the patch with a wag of its pincers. Genji sprawled on his back, the only thing above him a field of smoke and stars. The weeds had yellow flowers, and were softer than concrete.

 

Blue light swiveled back and forth over his armor. Genji loosened his nanomagnetic tethers and slipped the swords out from beneath his back, lining them in the sun-bleached grass. The sensor light upon him dimmed, and his visor followed. He tucked the omnic sphere against his stomach and fell asleep.

 

He dreamed of Zenyatta perched in a line of bodies beneath the wiry guts of the Pegasus, red sand and sunlight dripping from his hands.

 

A young man in a dress shirt and tie was looking at him from atop a scooter. Genji stirred at the growl of the small engine. The man’s shoe-heels were caked in dirt. A gold cobra pin with a retracted hood winked on the collar of his shirt. He did not wear a blazer.

 

“Shaku maku!” the man exclaimed, raising his right hand, and when Genji did not respond touched it over his heart. Genji’s visor panned up the beardless youth of the black-haired rider. He could not remain silent out of ignorance. Zenyatta had taught him the reply on the plane over from America.

 

“Alhamdulilah,” he eked out his best pronunciation, and the man grinned at him. His eyeliner brought out the flashy white of his teeth.

 

“Omnic?” he asked, followed by several more words Genji did not know. He nodded anyway. The man pointed up the eastern road and resumed his impenetrable instructions. He gestured at Genji’s bare legs. Genji nodded, more slowly. The man looked high over the fence, silver arrowheads turning from his ears. He frowned.

 

Genji twisted in the grass, and startled since the squid was still squatting right on the other side of the fence, its body brown and dusty in the daylight. Above it, on the catwalks between storage and processing, a group of Vishkar spoke with a gray-haired woman in a monochrome kaftan. Genji noticed a cobra stenciled on the side of the water tank. The young man murmured behind him. He gave Genji a little wave, and scooted on his way.

 

When Genji stood up, the squid extended a tentacle over the fence and misted the crumpled weeds. Genji tilted his head at the conversation overhead. His visor lingered on the drops of dew hanging tenuously from yellow radials and spearmint leaves.

 

“Hey,” he said, and the squid’s huge center eye rotated at him. “If you hear those people in purple say they are going to rebuild or remodel this plant, you should run away.” The squid exhaled sonorously through its vent ribs. “You are not locked inside.” Genji pointed at the tentacle hovering over the flowers. “You can go over the fence if you have to.” Little blue lights flicked on and off as the information processed. “Thank you,” Genji said. He bowed to the drone, and headed out to the intersection.

 

The man on the scooter told him east. As he pressed down the street, he spotted omnics gathering in that direction. Most passersby on his way were auto-trucks, faceless and rumbling toward their destination at one utility plant or another, carrying barrels of chemicals or mounds of debris. The buzz of a blue van sent Genji into an alleyway, peeping out like a radioactive mouse.

 

The omnics waited outside the bay doors of a mining facility. Shovel-nosed drones squatted in fenced lots on the sides, while the more humanoid machines loaded a dozen at a time into flatbeds that rumbled up a designated driveway. Genji discovered another cobra coiled over the doors, golden and open-hooded, guarding painted jewels and the company calligraphy. He scanned the clicking, humming throng, each omnic stuffed in a beige shift, raggedy jeans, or some other dirty paraphernalia.

 

A butterfly wing of yellow appeared between shifting machine legs.

 

Genji jogged into the crowd. As he probed for the colorful phantom, someone touched his back. She addressed him in Arabic. Genji shook his head. The omnic paused, noted the kanji stamped under his chest, and recalibrated to Japanese.

 

“They will not let you work without clothing.” She pointed a broken finger at the notched sweat pants tangled around her legs. “Either pants or a shirt that goes to your knees. They say it is so they know you are reliable. I know where you can get some. You can trade that.” She waved her fingers at the omnic sphere, squeezing between a couple others to whisper to him. “Where did you get it? It’s very--”

 

Her orange dot lights flushed. “What is that sound?” She canted the side of her red faceplate at Genji. “Are you…human?”

 

Genji turned away. Her hand clasped over his shoulder. “You cannot be here!” she cried. “You are not strong enough!” She covered her own shoulder: the metal had warped from the weight of loads moved, upper arm strut cracked and elbow oddly melted. Genji’s visor blinked at the damage, then twisted back toward the crowd. She raised her voice, “Human!” A few other silver heads glanced their way. Genji jerked his shoulder free and pushed toward a pair of shredded yellow ankles he identified close to the truck line. “You will get hurt!” she called across the crowd after him, synth swelling in heartbreak.

 

He shoved aside workers that cursed at him for cutting, and burst out beside an omnic lined by black and turquoise paneling: a bald, wingless neon bee. The omnic’s hands rested in fake pockets he had cut in the sides of his patchy yellow trousers. Another camouflage pattern omnic beside him had the red cord of a dhoti strung through the belt loops on his jeans. One of Genji’s hands coiled tight against the omnic sphere. The other flew to the hilt of his katana.

 

“Human, please be careful!” the red omnic called distantly. The two thieves looked at each other, lights blinking through some private conversation that ended with a shrug from the neon model. Genji’s fingers steeled against the sphere’s delicate lines. Neither of them had noticed him yet, though the nearby omnics retreated, their lights losing color. Genji looked around at the black eye slots while he ground his thumbpad into the katana hilt.

 

His hand dropped from the weapon as he circled around in front of the thieves. He squatted to confirm the stitching in the bee omnic’s trousers. The bee shook his head, plopping his hands on yellow hips and messaging the other one something that made him laugh. They had no dents on their bodies, no scratches or films of dried coolant on their fingers. Their dirty lights fluttered at him, and the camouflage omnic shooed him with both hands.

 

“Excuse me,” he said, standing up. “I am looking for my friend. Did he give you this clothing?”

 

_Please._

The thieves referenced each other, indicators blinking rapidly.

 

“He said we could take it,” the one in the yellow trousers buzzed out. “But, we thought he might be malfunctioning anyway. He did not even move!” He gawked at the sword hilt poking over Genji’s shoulders. Genji lowered his helmet, thinking. He spread his free arm out from the elbow, touching thumb and middle finger together.

 

“Like this?”

 

“Yes, that’s what he was doing!” The omnic nodded.

 

“We thought…he did not have any friends…” the omnic wearing Zenyatta’s dhoti whispered, and got an elbow to the chassis from his accomplice. “He did not seem like he needed the clothing,” he moaned, synthesizer paralyzed at high pitch.

 

“Okay.” Genji left the two in silence for a few seconds, caressing the grooves of the omnic sphere. “Where did you find him?”

 

“He is down the street!” the squeakier omnic gushed. “There’s--” Another jab from his partner finally shut him up. The bee omnic lowered his faceplate next to Genji’s.

 

“It’s a secret,” he hissed. “There is a place where the humans built the warehouses wrong. The alley has a branch off the side. We go there before the morning shift, but we do not want any of the others to find out about it. There is not enough room for all of them to go gawping.”

 

“I like it there,” the other omnic whimpered, tearful despite his empty black slots. “There are lots of cute animals. The Vishkar are going to build something without any asymmetry in place of it, I am sure.” His lights paled, and he touched his partner’s shoulder. “What if they build over the quarry?”

 

“Don’t be foolish.” The bee omnic’s words slurred together in the effort of his irritation. “The quarry makes more money for the humans still.”

 

“Which way is the alley?” Genji interrupted, voice quiet and neutral. The bee omnic bent over him and resumed whispering:

 

“If you go east, three blocks, it is on the right. For the secret part, you have to squeeze through a covered space between the buildings. Try not to miss it in the shadows. But if you listen, you can hear it.” He tapped the side of his neon skull.

 

“Thank you.” Genji left the pair of omnics to the trucks, and filed his way out of the crowd.

 

Defunct warehouses studded the street like broken teeth. Sand and ashes obscured the distinction between road and sidewalk. Genji’s footsteps disappeared moments after they were born. Three blocks down, the rooftops of decrepit buildings slumped together in a submerging kiss. The windy hole of the alleyway was filled with shadows, the sun a blank white beacon at the distant exit. Genji touched the wall, leaning his head inside, visor flickering as drafts howled through the murk.

 

He switched on his nightvision as he walked: dust bunnies, upside-down cockroach corpses, more insects shying away in flocks from his passing. Fallen roof tiles crackled beneath his feet. He stepped in a small puddle of water, the sound echoing up the brick walls and the old doors without handles. Genji stopped, shaking his foot clean. A new sound replaced the disturbance of water:

 

Wind chimes.

 

Genji lanced into the darkness. The chimes followed a restful melody, though a certain note missed its place in each cycle. Two warehouses met at an uneven slant midway down the alley, a sleeve left between their stone walls. As Genji approached a couple mice scampered out, white with pink eyes, as if just escaped from a genetic laboratory. They held still when his feet ran past, then scurried through coin-sized slits under the brick.

 

Maybe the insects were not cockroaches after all. As he pushed down the narrow side passage, Genji saw them lining the walls above, but they had deep blue scarab shells and sparks of gold in their briefly exposed wings. Bats, white as the mice, watched him from the rooftops. Water glazed the brick under his hands and coiled around his toes as he chased a pie slice of sunlight leaking into the passage ahead. The architecture wrenched open, blown into a rounded atrium by a warhead, which still lay purple and inert in the corner.

 

Zenyatta meditated in the circle of falling sunlight, naked except for a shawl of cream hexagons. His body was hazy with dust, omnic fingerprints streaked across his chassis and bare legs. Every step Genji took tricked a new translucent golden arm into view, while others faded. Whenever he fleetingly detected all of them, they were set out from Zenyatta’s modest lotus in a spiral, each cupping a sphere in the monk’s halo. Whenever the chime melody struck its empty note, they all disappeared.

 

The Iris not the only entity lingering in the sun. Above Zenyatta’s head floated a night-colored slick, its smoky arms contorted into a rough diamond. It ate the light that touched it, writing a stronger shadow on the cobbles than any part of Zenyatta. But carried inside the roiling nebula were flecks of bone-white and transient pinheads of metal. It smelled: like the graveyard, like blood.

 

Genji entered the atrium, puddles of water ringing as his feet lifted out of them. Ribbons of plantlife and scarabs caked the swampy bricks on one side. The rest of the walls had been red originally, but paled under layers of sand. Mayflies drifted on the edge of the sunlight, occasionally disappearing as white bats swooped down to snatch them from the air. The bats would snip out the body, leaving the wings to shimmer to the ground. Zenyatta’s resting place was surrounded by a bed of iridescent petals.

 

He dropped to his knees before the golden statue. Zenyatta hovered lower in meditation. It was easy to bind arms around him, even from the wormy ground. Genji hugged Zenyatta, budging his head beneath the monk’s jaw.

 

Eventually his visor rose at the shadow dripping over Zenyatta’s bowed faceplate.

 

Two ephemeral arms separated from their respective spheres to contain the darkness between their palms, only to vanish as the chimes rolled silent. Genji let go of Zenyatta, studying the monk’s dull array as the melody cycled. He picked up the omnic sphere from his side, and lifted it into the halo. The song proceeded with sluggish indifference until the missing note finally sounded its part.

 

Zenyatta raised his head.

 

“Ah…” he sighed. “I was feeling a little unbalanced.” He looked down at himself and tugged on the shreds of fabric hanging around his chest.

 

“You didn’t stop them,” Genji observed more than asked, resting his hands on the tops of his thighs.

 

“Clothing comes and goes so often. It is not important.” Zenyatta’s grip tightened on the rags. “Are you not the very model of that philosophy?” he teased Genji warmly, allowing his fingers to slip from the hexagon print. “This was too torn. It did not suit their purposes.” Genji sighed, coolant cylinders releasing from his shoulders. Zenyatta peeped at the mist escaping the peaks of his silhouette.

 

“And you cured the child of those kidnappers?” Genji asked in a quavering voice. Zenyatta lifted his head at the shadow corralled in the air. Both his silver hands ascended to it, fingers relaxing as they neared. He unshelved the anomaly from the sunlight, lowering it in front of his chest. Joining his palms, he dissipated the black body of it. It rattled to seclusion somewhere, though Genji did not see any of the Shambali spheres open to admit it.

 

“He was well when I left him,” Zenyatta said, dropping his hands over his naked kneecaps.

 

“There were people at his house. Vishkar. They were looking for you.”

 

“Oh?” Zenyatta’s voice was nothing but inviting. “You will have to tell me about it.” Genji’s visor darkened. He shuffled back on his haunches, putting a gap between himself and Zenyatta, whose lights glowed in response. “Genji?”

 

“I will later, Zen.” Genji inhaled, and folded his arms over the wet, shattered cobbles. He braced his forehead to the ground. The gears in Zenyatta’s spine shifted as the young omnic leaned forward to look at him. Zen’s shadow played through the water, partitioned and luminous, the most beautiful of ghosts. “I have returned to you,” Genji announced loudly against the filth. He flexed up the chrome scales protecting the back of his neck, fully exposed aside from the silken cross of his ribbon.

 

He heard the knells of Zenyatta’s fingers tipping together. His teacher observed him a while.

 

“Have you released your desire for revenge?” Zenyatta proposed, voice warm as the sunlight sneaking over the backs of their heads.

 

“No.”

 

Discipline maintained the set of Genji’s shoulders, humility kept his back curved before the monk.

 

“Then why have you returned?” Zenyatta asked. “Do you miss our friendship?”

 

“That is not why I have returned.”

 

“Do you fear the world when you are alone?”

 

The flat meeting of Genji’s fingertips curled. He dug his knuckles against the earth.

 

“I neither love nor fear the world,” he answered. “It has no bearing on my need to be with you.” His synthesizer went throaty on the second statement. His chest exhaled against his bent legs, reflecting over his abdomen. He could almost hear the little giveaway ticking inside. “But I did not know I had nothing to fear until I entered the desert.”

 

“Why did you go there? Because I told you to? Because of your brother?”

 

“I thought I would find my resolve there.” Genji breathed as he sat up. He kept his head low, view illuminated only by the pieces of Zenyatta’s reflection, the star-like turns of his mala. “I once thought I had been born only for Hanzo.” In the water, with Zenyatta, he spotted the green stripe of his own visor. “I wasn’t very happy with that,” he sighed. “But after what he did, in my mind that idea became that I existed to end him. Everything else was a distraction. You made me happy.” He turned his head side-to-side slowly, watching his light shift in the reflection. “And it was a distraction. I always used to blow off my duty, it made sense to me that I would do the same even with this.”

 

He was looking at his hands, not sure he would ever unknot his fingers from the fists they made against his thighs. Stings of pressure traveled up his wrists. “I just knew that one day I would make a mistake, I would let you see too much of me, and I would drive you away. Then I would be alone again, and I could do what I was meant to. That was my wish. And I succeeded. You left.”

 

“And what happened then?”

 

Water slipped off the chrome wings of Genji’s chest, dappling the backs of his hands.

 

“I realized what you have been trying to teach me is that people change.” His shoulders stiffened. “And what I have called a distraction is my life.” He closed his visor feed, and finally his hands relaxed. “I asked myself ‘who is Genji Shimada?’ I used to think it was someone who died a long time ago. But I am alive…and I am allowed to be someone other than that boy, and something more than a sword.”

 

Sunlight dried his shoulders and arms. Dew rang metallic over the old missile sleeping in the corner. “The world changes too. You teach me their languages and history. I would have never understood--” Genji rocked his weight forward in the effort of finding his words. He knew Zenyatta would wait for him. “Other people are not just bodies living impossible lives. They are like me. They want things, and they can be hurt. You show me their poetry and art, which helps me express myself, if I alone do not know the words. I usually don’t,” he laughed. “And now every time I walk through their world I feel like I see more.”

 

“But you do not see a future?” Zenyatta asked. “Only your revenge?” Genji’s visor switched back on.

 

“I see a lot for a selfish person, but I am still very ignorant. Death remains the only thing I am good at. I am not Mondatta having visions of all the years to come,” Genji grumbled, and Zenyatta allowed a soft laugh out of his synthesizer. “Maybe I was wrong to answer so quickly the first time. Hanzo…is a name for this pain inside me.” He flattened his hand to his heart. “The demon that wounds me in my dreams, and shows up in different faces every time I think I have conquered him. I stopped seeing him as a person a long time ago. If I killed my brother, that would never stop him from hurting me.”

 

Ripples from his knees glimmered across Zenyatta’s reflection. “You have taught a terrible student to find new purpose. You have given him the whole world with just your words. So I believe you can teach him to live with a pain that will always be. If that is called forgiveness, so be it. If learning from you in perpetuity is a future, then that is the one I see. That is why I have returned, Master. My revenge will be that I become free.”

 

Zenyatta leaned closer, sheltering Genji from the sun. Even in the monk’s silence, Genji did not fear.

 

“Raise your head,” Zenyatta said, and when Genji obeyed, he found a silver hand stretched open in front of him. When he wrapped his fingers around it, Zenyatta embraced him. “As ever and always, we will learn together, my student.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter:** My heart is a dragon's heart.
>   * Katanas are very fragile when it's not the magical bellbottom future of Overwatch, please don't kick them or grind them on metal objects.
>   * Select lyrics from "Avant Nous" by Édith Piaf (1956):  
>  Et tout change, et tout est pareil / Le bonheur n'est pas le nôtre (And everything changes, and everything is the same / The happiness is not our own)  
>  L'amour n'est pas cette misère / L'amour, c'est toi entre mes bras (Love is not this misery / Love, it is you between my arms)  
>  Et comme ceux qui s'aimeront / Après nous (And like those who will love / After us)
>   * _River of Heaven_ \- Japanese term for the Milky Way, the most distant stars in the galaxy containing Earth
>   * _sot_ \- French word for foolish
>   * _shaku maku_ \- Iraqi greeting, literally "What is everything and nothing?", functionally means "What's up?"
>   * _alhamdulilah_ \- literally "Praise God", when responding to _shaku maku_ the meaning is "All good"
>   * _maku shi_ \- another _shaku maku_ response, meaning "There's nothing"
>   * Current mood: Preacher season 2, episode 1, when the title card pops up: "THE SEARCH FOR GOD - DAY ONE"
> 



	18. Find the River to Find the Sea

 

Mondatta’s bare feet knelled across the wet floor of the monastery. Between his body and the dripping skylight, the air electrified with thorny carousels of omnic symbology. Glyph chains swirled and glistened through his white clothing, flowing off the threads in pixelating holograms. He approached the eight-armed manifest of the Iris. A luminescent hand feathered across the exposed diagonal of his chest. He gathered the shadows of shoulders and the tender golden poles of a waist in his arms, leaning his high cheek into the fingers that came investigating. Droplets of melted snow tapped across his face, each impact an uncontested echo through the empty atrium. Greedy hands reached for the black holes of his eyes. With Zenyatta’s arms around him, Mondatta vanished in a ripple of unseen waters.

 

_Are you awake?_

Lime light grew from a bare sheen in Genji’s face to a slice of vigilance in the night. The ceiling stared back at him with a cracked eye full of stars. His vision adjusted across the concrete, parsing the hammock rope bristling from the walls in thick cobwebs. The sky of the universe danced a turn above the broken roof, and the black smoke had gone, its final gift of ashes resting over his face. The soft nightingale of Lumanti’s voice returned to him through the darkness of air and Net.

 

_Loch4n4: I apologize._

He twisted his cheek against the hammock straps, turning his head back and forth, a dismissal Lumanti would not see. 1:02, he thought. It was 4:02 in Nepal, her time.

 

_Loch4n4: Is Master well?_

Genji examined the flaccid arm looped over his chest. Another lightly curled fist lay at his side. Fingers tingling awake, he reeled Zenyatta in, propping the monk’s head on his breastplate. Zenyatta’s body proved buoyant in his hands, linked with him, but not fully solid on the hammock. With the heavy sleeper positioned for display, Genji cocked his arm up. Packets of nanomachines concentrated into glossy facets across the center of his palm, a picture-in-picture of his and Zenyatta’s faces attaching to his visual feed one microscopic dot at a time.

 

Genji squirreled his other hand out from under Zenyatta’s shoulder to make a peace sign, and transmitted the auxiliary video to Lumanti. As she took hold of his stream, he smelled stringent black tea, tasted fresh kiwi bound in a cotton cloth, recalled eels getting yanked from wooden buckets and split in half at the height of summer. She had shown him her window garden once. Her fingers made probing silver nets across the dirt, and shrieked away when she accidentally nudged one of the genetically prescribed nightcrawlers-- she thought she had killed it.

 

_Loch4n4: I had a terrible dream._

“Uh,” he grunted with the vocal simulation multiple teams of scientists had toiled at recreating from phone records. Zenyatta’s head turned against him. Genji scrutinized the nine lights, but they remained dim. He dropped his filming hand closer to his chest. “Was Mondatta in it?” he whispered to Lumanti through the stream.

 

_Loch4n4: There were three birds in a window. One of them was yellow, he flew away into a spider’s web. I am sure it was Master Zenyatta!_

 

Genji dropped his head back into the bow of the hammock, sighing.

 

“Must be a big spider,” he chuckled. He raised his hand, showing the ropes enveloping him and Zenyatta. “Could it be, a spider’s web?” Lumanti digested the stream data in silence. Her only transmission was a fat silver emoji with blush lines inconceivably etched beneath its eyeslots. “Was one of the other birds me?” Genji probed, a heartbeat of laughter restrained in his chest.

 

_Loch4n4: One was white and fluffy like a baby. It reminded me of you a little._

 

“…thanks.”

 

_Loch4n4: But mostly I thought it was me. Doing nothing, ignorant, while Master suffered a terrible fate!_

 

“What did the last bird look like?” Genji asked. Zenyatta’s hand flexed against his side.

 

_Loch4n4: An owl, maybe._

 

“Then it is a lucky dream, maybe,” Genji chided. Movement in the corners of the hovel: omnic spheres slipped from various perches high off the floor. Genji switched off the auxiliary video after telling Lumanti, “Not so terrible after all.” As the last of the spheres joined a crown over the hammock, Zenyatta’s lights swelled to active star blue, and he lifted his face from Genji’s chest. Genji met him with an allaying hand over the pins of his waist.

 

The gesture became a caress up his ascetic frame. Genji stole under the cloth tangled around Zenyatta’s shoulders, and flirted with the diagram of rods enshrining his neck. He shook his head. Zenyatta scanned the night of the crumbling room, secured the drape of his arm across white armor, and dwindled back to sleep. The spheres locked their positions in the air nearby this time.

 

_Loch4n4: Genji…_

Resting his face against Zenyatta’s, Genji did not answer. He simply left the contact active until Lumanti built herself up to her words.

 

_Loch4n4: Master’s body is dirty._

For the first time since their reunion, Genji noticed flakes of concrete staining the rings around Zenyatta’s upper arms, and scrapes of ash leaking down his golden jawline. He brushed crumbles of dirt off the lenses of Zenyatta’s array, and could smell the alley brickwork in them.

 

_karroten: He hangs out in dirty places. But we are leaving today. We can find water in the desert._

He thumbed one of Zen’s drooping black slots, unseating the dust collected in the corner. Even with the curtain of destruction cleaned from the sky, specks of soot drifted the air, clung to metal like smears of crude oil.

 

_karroten: I miss the snow._

_Loch4n4: I miss you. Come and visit?_

_karroten: You just saw me!_

_Loch4n4: Maybe it is better to say_ we _miss you. The village has changed, but you and Master are still gone. There are many new ones here for you to meet._

_karroten: I will come home someday. As for Zen, who can say?_

_Loch4n4: I know, Brother. Whimsical as the wind._

 

4:30. Zenyatta’s hand rested on Genji’s cheek as they lay face-to-face. Dawn leaked through the ceiling and the constellation of omnic spheres to soften their linked chrome.

 

Zenyatta twisted upright, bracing his legs over the side of the hammock. He extracted the silk from the steel bracket of his shoulders and spent a minute folding it in his lap, passing the finished triangle to Genji. Sliding from the hammock tethers, he fished for the ground. His sandals ticked into the shattered bones of the floor, slipped off, settled. He cleared away from their bed, the roof’s leaking sunrise narrowing to a violet slant down his legs. His spheres gathered loosely around him.

 

He stretched. Hidden motors whirred as he spoked his arm over his head, flexing the other hand behind to hold his elbow. Spinal screws flashed in the dark, built from composite metals a trace more reflective than their surrounding shells. Semi-elastic wire glittered as it tensed between nodes, relaxing with Zenyatta when he dropped his arms. Hub plates whispered past each other, lines of repeat motion etched in his dust layer. He was not like the wind, Genji thought. Too deliberate and solid. Any part of him that chanced into the sun glowed like an immaculate scale floating in the river.

 

Zenyatta sighed off the remains of sleep with a flap of his synth. Genji folded the gift of silk higher up the hammock and rocked onto his feet, approaching from behind. He reached for the monk, only to stop and consider the intersecting white and black web of his hand in the sunlight. He settled at Zenyatta’s side instead, mirroring his movements, a ripple in his wake.

 

Eventually Zenyatta shifted out of routine to collect Genji’s arm. Genji allowed himself to be steered into a familiar couplet, Zenyatta’s arm and his own meeting biceps to shoulders in an overlapping ouroboros. Free hands flowed backward to catch rising legs. _Flamant._ Genji snorted. Zenyatta did not indulge him, focusing on the balance of their bodyweights against one another. Flooded soil and soaked ivy wreathed the scent of his arms and chest. Genji’s mind went to bloodstains on Zenyatta’s hands after they finished surface burials of the Deadlock corpses, and to distant window gardens engulfed by green vegetables. Zenyatta’s foot extended off the floor, just a toe retaining him.

 

“Stay with me, Master,” Genji warned. Zenyatta recaptured the earth beneath his sandal.

 

They perched on the tatters of living room rugs, one leg reserved for the floor, other limbs engaged with each other or posed in complements a breath apart. They sat together, and leveraged the similar sizing of their bodies into perfect upward angles of their legs, timeless meetings of their hands. They submitted shoulders to one another, spines hissing in tireless curvature.

 

Zenyatta bade Genji to his feet, then laid on his back before him. Genji widened his stance. “Shouldn’t I be the one--” Zenyatta flicked his head to one side. “I understand.” Genji turned his back, trying to relax his hands beside his thighs.

 

Breathed out.

 

Fell backward.

 

Gravity seized his helpless figure, accelerating-- and crashing as Genji settled to a pedestal of bent legs, lifted away from the earth by strong hands. Zenyatta squeezed his ankles and Genji pointed his toes straight, no further ambitions of landing. Zenyatta helped him bend one leg back, the other pinned out in a compass arrow toward the sun.

 

Genji craned his head, tracing the shadow of his ribbon across the floor. A correcting toe worried the small of his back. He turned his face obediently north, only to find himself seeking the sky through the hole in the roof. Another press from below: Genji abandoned his neck, allowing his head to droop back and drink of plaster walls and windowed streetside. His hands made prospective knots around Zenyatta’s legs, but they were just shapes. He did not apply any pressure. Drafts blew through the glassless windows and wrapped his suspended limbs.

 

“This is your body,” Zenyatta told him. “With this body, you can meet the world.” Genji stared upside-down at the façade of the abandoned rooms, and did not think about his body. He thought this bombed out box sufficed for wanderers, but children and their families could not abide it. They lived in graveyards instead.

 

The telltale buzz of a bluebottle van winged their hiding place, shadow clipping through the light from the windows. Genji’s stillness shattered in a hard breath, bent knee quivering, weighty film of dust outlining the break in his posture. Exhaling, he lifted his feet away from Zenyatta’s handholds, carrying his legs over his head and folding over backwards to find the floor. Genji shook his head, a motion carried down his neck into his shoulders.

 

He glanced at the window, empty now. “I thought we might go and meet with the Vishkar after we are done here,” Zenyatta said as he twined up onto the air. “We could find out what they want.”

 

“We can’t.” Genji steeled his arms at his sides. Zenyatta approached and glided his fingers down the padded joinder between his neck and shoulders. “I don’t trust them,” Genji insisted. Zenyatta’s hand slipped inward to the paired cording and hexagon pad sheltering Genji’s voice. The tension through his upper body released with an electrical frizzle.

 

“You are not very trusting,” Zenyatta observed warmly.

 

“You let people steal the clothing off your back. I am not the problem here!” Genji declared, arcing on his toes. “I trusted the drone at the water plant,” he added.

 

“That is because, despite all you have seen…” Zenyatta spread his hands toward his own abdomen. More alley dirt resided there, filled with the flashing scars of thieves’ fingerprints. “Do you still believe machines are better than humans?” Genji glared at the floor. “Because no machine has ever succeeded in hurting you like a human has. How do we begin, my student? In innocence? Or merely ignorance?” Zenyatta tucked a bent finger beneath Genji’s chin, lifting his face.

 

“I did not tell you before,” Genji confessed. “But when I faced the soldiers in the desert, one of them was an omnic. An omnic helped Talon destroy Angela’s hospital. He wanted to change the world by hurting his own people.” Zenyatta’s steadying hand withdrew.

 

“Do humans not attack and wound each other? For reasons just as petty or grand?” Blue was a cold color, but coming from the tiny lights above Zenyatta’s eyes, it looked like the open sky. “Common origins alone will not give us unity. Human and omnic are all driven to the same ends. My soul is not different from yours.” Genji’s own lights colored, the sly smile of his reflection shining across Zenyatta’s face. He captured the retreating hand.

 

“I wonder,” he challenged. He leaned closer, fingers sinking through the gaps between Zenyatta’s. “Master,” he prompted, voice deepening.

 

“Yes?” Zenyatta answered quickly, a little loud. Genji stared. His fiery green cooled across Zenyatta’s mirror surfaces.

 

“All these people are trying to change the world,” he continued gently. Zenyatta flickered in surprise. “I don’t know what any of them really want.” He let Zenyatta go and walked to the windows, where blue cathedrals grew over the city’s frumpy skyline. “Are you the same? Do you want something to be different?” Zenyatta drifted to the empty windowsill beside him, hands folded in his lap.

 

“I have only ever defended others against those who would harm them,” he answered. “And healed wounds caused by those who would have the world changed.”

 

“You are making it simple,” Genji critiqued, claiming one of those precisely posed hands to rub beneath his thumb as they stood in the burgeoning light. “Do not forget you are curious too.” Zenyatta peeked up at him. “You are always trying to satisfy your curiosity. That is something I love about you, because I am the same.”

 

“There is always a deeper mystery,” Zenyatta admitted in a puff of unfettered pleasure. “We could go to India,” he decided.

 

“Whaaaat?” Genji laughed.

 

“You told me you wish to leave this place. If we went to India, we could learn much about the trustworthiness of the Vishkar.” Genji squeezed the captive hand. “Their home is the city Utopaea in that country,” Zenyatta offered.

 

“Of course it is called that,” Genji hissed. “Yo!” His voice rolled back to playful: “That sounds awfully close to Nepal.” Zenyatta strained his neck cords pulling his head back. “Ohhh,” Genji cooed. “Now you do not want to go?”

 

“Let us begin by venturing outside,” Zenyatta sighed. “Time to face the sun, my friend.”

 

“Sure!” Genji retrieved Zenyatta’s cloth from the hammock and laid it around his shoulders. As they departed the crumpled house, breezes knocked loose asphalt around their legs. Zenyatta pinned a couple fingers to his silk. Genji looked out to the end of the street, where the town cracked apart into a coverless flat of salt and sand. “Do you have any stipend left from Mondatta’s visit?” he asked. Zenyatta showed him the amount in a hologram over his palm. “That should be enough. Look.” Genji pointed at a shop on the lip of the desert, a dress flowering down the sign above the door. “We will buy something to protect you. It won’t be as nice as the stuff from Oasis. I wish we had bought the clothes you liked. They were light, you might have been willing to carry them back here.”

 

“They would have been stolen all the same.” Zenyatta followed Genji to the shop. His hand came to rest on the back of Genji’s arm.

 

A woman in blue lipstick sat behind the counter, her hijab ruffling with beats of her paper fan. She wore large square sunglasses, and her mouth did not so much as twitch when they entered. Her fan slowed a little as Zenyatta floated past.

 

The shop was repurposed from a convenience store, empty plastic food racks slumped on the back wall. The clothing hangars had been constructed from junkyard scraps, a collection of mostly shorts, tees, and baseball caps draped off uneven branches. Not a dress in sight. Genji thumbed the foot of a baby’s jumpsuit dangling next to a patchwork of jeans and purses. Zenyatta looked closely at a pair of yellow shorts covered in palm trees, and prised the tag out of the waistband to survey where and how the clothing had been made.

 

“I used to be really fashionable!” Genji burst as he moved on to the t-shirts.

 

“You made your clothing?” Zenyatta asked, joining him.

 

“Well, no.” Genji rifled through the rainbow of sleeves. “I was just big on Harajuku.” He turned around with a blue shirt framed to his chest. Zenyatta was slow to recover the lilt of his face toward what had been Genji’s bare backside. Genji paused, and turned his hip back the monk’s way. “See something you like?” he snickered.

 

“You do not wear anything now,” was all Zenyatta said.

 

“It’s okay.” Genji shrugged a wide dismissal. “It just gets in the way.” He gestured one of the t-shirt sleeves at Zen, who dutifully followed the movement. “But for this great hardship I will match you,” Genji promised. “You do not have to take on one of these things alone!” Zenyatta’s lights twinkled. “This one is long enough, you think?” Genji showed off the print. “Isn’t this a cute mech?” He tapped his finger on the two-legged machine jetting across the front. Its creamy smoke trail spelled _MEKA._ “It’s sturdy…” Genji turned the shirt from front to back, and dragged on the resistant nanofiber mesh. Zenyatta took the shoulder of one sleeve after Genji’s movements flashed the calligraphy on the back to him. He turned the shirt around and flickered at the Arabic. “What’s wrong with it?” Genji looked down the shirt back. “What does it say?”

 

“Our Love is With MEKA,” Zenyatta quoted. Then, “Destroy the Beast.” The calligraphy formed a single-eyed, exploding omnic skull.

 

Genji folded the tee back over its hangar.

 

He found another shirt with a Pachimari dancing in its inky fabric. _PACHI-A-GO-GO!_ it said in a ring around the turnipoid, nothing on the back. Genji exhaled, presenting the shirt to Zenyatta.

 

“This one is always reliable. And look how many arms he has!” Zenyatta checked the label on the shirt collar, and nodded. “Okay.” Genji flapped his hands to his sides. “It is your turn, you can pick for me.” Zen folded the Pachimari over his lap as he considered the circle of colors. After fishing through the labels, he pulled out a white shirt with a headphone-wearing frog in the center. The back read _PEACE IN THE HARMONY_ in reflective gold. Genji winced. “Actually, that one is a little kid’s shirt…” he murmured. Zenyatta retracted the offering, turning it around in his hands to study it.

 

“How do you know?” he asked.

 

“I saw a little kid wearing it!” Genji growled. Zenyatta extended his arm toward the store clerk.

 

“She is an adult, yet she wears this clothing.” Genji glanced across the rack-tops and spotted familiar pale green beneath the clerk’s hijab. “It is not sized appropriately for a child,” Zenyatta continued in stalwart mechanical logic. Genji deflated.

 

They approached the clerk. Zenyatta held out the currency hologram, but before the woman could scan it, Genji leaned forward and tapped the counter.

 

“Is this some baby’s stream character?” he demanded, pointing at the frog tucked over Zenyatta’s forearm. The woman’s sunglasses dropped down her nose as she blinked at him. Zenyatta offered a translation. The woman answered in a rumble, tugging on the silk around her neck.

 

“She claims you are the baby if you do not know the famous DJ Lúcio,” Zenyatta translated back to him. “This is a symbol of her opposition to the Vishkar’s plans for the city. She says she is personally offended by your words and will now charge us double.”

 

“She should give us a discount since she has that MEKA shirt for sale,” Genji argued back, but Zenyatta let the woman take his money and translated nothing. He kept talking with the woman a while. Genji slunk out the door after the first minute.

 

“I asked her if there was a bath nearby,” Zenyatta explained when he emerged.

 

“Like we have any money left now.”

 

“She did not actually charge us extra.”

 

Genji looked at him. Zenyatta raised his arm, both shirts displayed, both offered equally. Genji touched his hands together in front of his face, and took the black one with Pachimari.

 

“I’m sure she answered no,” he sighed as they squirmed into baggy frames of cloth. “They do not have a lot of water here, except where the rich people live.” The black shirt curtained down Genji’s thighs. The white one weighted the silk at Zenyatta’s neck and coated his lap in cloudy billows. A hardlight dome welled up in the west, tall enough to tint the whole street blue. “Maybe she can at least change that much,” Genji buzzed, watching the dome walls crystallize. Zenyatta glanced up from fine adjustments of his shirt around his knees. “One of the Vishkar,” Genji explained. “She was strong. And considerate.” He rubbed his elbow. “She was familiar to me, yet she does not destroy everything like I do, or repair people like you.” A bridge coalesced over their heads, linking immense spires in the north and south. Genji breathed out his words: “She creates new things.”

 

“But you do not wish to speak with her?”

 

“Well she did chase me around with some crazy gun,” Genji snorted. “Something was strange. Not her, but the rest of them.” He crossed his arms, thinking at the ground. “Sorry.” He rested his hand on his stomach, under Pachimari’s wagging tentacles. “Angela did not trust them.” Zenyatta nodded.

 

“Then we should get going.”

 

* * *

 

Mireille shook her head, the gray points of her hair pixelating across the phone video. But she still listened, staggering her fingers up her cheekbone. Broken barks of song echoed back through the microphone on her side.

 

_Et comme…qui s’aimeront…_

“I apologize dear, I don’t think I have ever heard this. Though the noise in the background is difficult to listen through, don’t you think?” Genji nodded, looking into Zenyatta’s raised palm. His visor leveled to the center of their shared camera panel.

 

“You should know it, Mamie,” Keandre piped in, brown eyes poking over the bottom of the second panel, where previously he had only been the roots of dreadlocks. Mireille cocked her eyebrow.

 

“Why is that?” she wondered.

 

“It’s old lady music,” he declared.

 

“Well!” Mireille squeaked. She shooed her grandson off her lap. “Sorry we could not be of more help,” she sniffed.

 

“It was just a curiosity of mine,” Genji dismissed. He switched half his visor dark at her. “And an excuse.”

 

“Stay curious!” she laughed. She leaned her face into her hand, studying the video of the two wanderers, nudging her lips into her fingers. “Zenyatta,” she commanded, prompting the videographer to look at his own hand attentively. “For my very professional assistance in this matter, I expect an extra photograph this week. Not just the one!” Her eyes closed, lids shaded gold, a smile overtaking her whole face. “I so love how you see the world.” Zenyatta poked his free hand into the camera panel, V for victory _._ Genji folded his arms behind his head as the connection shut down, eyeing the monk.

 

“She likes you.”

 

“We became very intimate in our Go battles,” Zenyatta admitted.

 

“Is that the way?” Genji pondered in a wispy drone, visor light bubbling low.

 

The sky answered, clapping clouds together over mountains in the south. Licks of pine cast off the burgundy foothills, and the granite pyramids raised their faces to heaven’s overflowing anvils. Genji’s reflective armor darkened alongside the world around him, but his lights burned in the cooling air. “There must be water in those valleys,” he growled to Zenyatta, whose head tracked the onrush of cloudy mountains above the ones made of stone. “I can smell it!” Genji sprang out ahead, one kilometer, two; sprinting across the evergreen toes of the metamorphosing terrain did not tire him, and he never lost his balance among the old lightning-split stumps. Thunder vivified above his head, snapping open its jaws.

 

Zenyatta found him on a river’s edge in a valley, surrounded by the fuzzy pink threads of low-lying tamarisk trees. Blue juniper berries and pastel flowers floated down the river in an endless clouded garland, flashing white with the passages of lightning. On the opposite bank, flits of sunlight made sword edges out of steppe grass. Genji huddled in the shadow of the forest, knees tucked to his torso. One of his hands hung forward with thumb and little finger linked, other digits extended in a limp skyward claw. A sheep walk made of faintly luminescent tiles arced across the river downstream. Crescents of silver sand barely larger than beds filled out the riverbank, periwinkle frogs mulling through the shallows after minnows.

 

“I think I got overexcited,” Genji said, a shiver cracking down his shoulders. “I waited for you.” His black shirt flapped from the circle of his arms, his chest bare and coated in red pine mulch. His ribbon billowed behind him on the storm’s cold arrival. “You missed it though.” Zenyatta approached the water, relaxing one hand across the white lap of his clothing, dipping the other into the shallows. “There was a big wolf drinking at the other side. I ran right up but he ignored me.” Genji’s shadow expanded across the sand, pointing at the far bank.

 

Zenyatta did not see anything constituting a pawprint, just a handful of broken grass stems. “I was running blindly-- I broke a branch, it sounded like a bone, and I was just panicking for no reason like I do.” Genji was always laughing, making light. “But I saw him and I was sure he would be frightened of me, but he just finished his drink and left. Maybe I do not smell or look enough like a scary human.” Zenyatta withdrew his hand from the water. There was not enough pollution to corrode their metal or coat their bodies in toxins that might harm others. The area carried a scent of smoke and ancient hickory, but all the trees around the river were new. Zenyatta glanced at the empty sheep walk downstream, then up the bank to Genji. Genji peeped back at him with the pale startle of a cat’s eye in the night.

 

“Let us work a little, my friend.”

 

“We can wash first.” Genji dropped out of the darkness to the sand, t-shirt balled in his fist. “Right?” Zenyatta gazed up into the storm clouds. “We can wait too,” Genji amended quickly. “Maybe once the thunder is ten counts away.”

 

They waited. Zenyatta transmitted a series of jataka poems to Genji to pass the time, from Prince Sattva to Rathasena. It was still raining when they washed their clothing, and Genji pinned everything over an apple tree’s branches to suffer uncertain drying in the gusts. Zenyatta sank in waist-deep water and rubbed dirt from his sandals.

 

Genji dove into the current, overpowering the river with a few thrusts of his legs. Lightning spit across a mountaintop, and he free-floated a few seconds, but the thunder that emerged was a slow, distant gurgle. He resumed frog kicking back and forth along the river bottom, trying to keep up with the fish.

 

He noticed Zenyatta fixated on some pebbles stuck in his sandal plate. The monk had drifted into the current, though he remained seated near the surface, and the river surged weightlessly around him.

 

Genji paddled slowly out of his peripheral. He slithered toward the curve of Zenyatta’s back, arms spread wide. His hands scoured forward, level with Zenyatta’s waist, fingers hooking to demonstrate their toothy, crocodilian qualities. He hesitated, checking up through the water: Zenyatta remained bundled forward, digging at an uncooperative foot.

 

Genji launched off the river bottom and swiped his arms in.

 

Iron fingers trapped his wrists. Zenyatta stood in the river with the unyielding grace of a colossus, his toes swaying a few centimeters off the bottom. When he turned around, his prisoner hung both arms out until he could find his grip on them again. Genji luminesced pale under the coursing water. The barrier between them fractured Zenyatta’s face into a mob of glimmering steel shards, all watching him with blue eyes.

 

 _karroten:_ _Yo~_

_Z_E_N: You will not achieve cleanliness only from swimming._

 

Zenyatta released him. Genji sank to his knees in the sand. Pinholes of sunlight opened across the river, the juniper berries turned up robin’s egg blue, and the drifting flowers tinted pink fractals across his face. Zenyatta’s bare body floated before him.

 

He wrapped his hand around the back of an articulated silver knee. Even in better light, Zenyatta’s array and eyeslots smeared in the changing waters, unreadable.

 

Genji tugged the problem foot up, and with a few tricks of his fingers, removed the rocks.

 

He rose from the water. Zenyatta plied his joints for mud. Genji carried scoops of water to that golden smile, scrubbing off the old ash.

 

“This reminds me of home,” he said, watching the storm break around the snowy mountaintops. Zenyatta did not look up from his work. “I wonder if we climbed to the top of one of these, we would find a monastery!”

 

“You are very nostalgic today.” Zenyatta lined the slashes in Genji’s torso with river water, tapping the ribs of red-gray padding when he needed Genji to vent it back out. “A river led us to the monastery in Nepal,” he added, pitch peaking upwards in surprise when he discovered the longing was infectious.

 

“I thought Mondatta saw it in a dream,” Genji grunted, looking under his arm at the color of the water coming out of him. Some of the tint was old, dry copper. Zenyatta laughed, synth playing like it came from deep in his chest.

 

“We wandered the valley. We could not see the mountain peaks past the clouds, and at the time life was very much ‘if we cannot see it, it does not exist’. Thus we were trapped, and the river provided the only path. It led us to the cliffs, and we learned to climb,” he sighed. “I was pleased when the same river befriended me again later, and led me to you after your abrupt departure.”

 

“What, by that rundown house? That was more of a stream,” Genji scoffed.

 

“To we who are born in the desert, everything is an ocean,” Zenyatta proposed. “I have come to love the water, and the changes it brings.” His hand graced the back of Genji’s head, and Genji enthusiastically pushed into their affirming touch of lights. Lingering rain inspired a symphony of diamond circles in the water, and a stench like cut grass from the other shore. Thunder snarled far away beneath its shroud of bruised clouds. Zenyatta lifted his face to the gray of the sky. Water tapped his faceplate, a tin echo in the breeze. He was stroking Genji’s head, just under his ribbon. “We can wait to work,” he offered, fingers slipping from the wet helmet plate. “Would you like your hair washed?”

 

“It’s fine, Master!” Genji buried his surprise, and threw a clumsy arm around Zenyatta’s hip. “What did you want to work on?” Zenyatta’s dark slots stuck on Genji’s face a moment. He twined his arm around to match Genji and crafted a circle of their bodies. His hand was more precise, indexing between the low points of Genji’s shoulders, the backside of the kanji on his armor.

 

“Here.”

 

Genji made a show of trying to look down his own back.

 

“The dragon,” he confirmed after patient silence was the only response to his delaying.

 

“This pain is from your own sword,” Zenyatta said.

 

“It is never a surprise to me.” Genji exhaled as Zenyatta’s hand fell from the pulsepoint. “He hates this body.”

 

Zenyatta cupped Genji’s elbow, and Genji nodded to him. The monk led him ashore, made him lay on his stomach beneath the frothy shade of a tamarisk. Genji rested his cheek to his folded arms, watching the feathery leaves make congress in the wind. He waved a hand at the stretch of his body. “The first time I summoned him, he tried to destroy it.”

 

“You call him by a name other than your own,” Zenyatta considered as he got on his knees at Genji’s side. “Yet when you showed yourself to me before, your assertion was that there is only you.” He tapped two fingers on Genji’s spine. “You believe this form is what causes the pain?”

 

“He never hurt me when I was human. I was the first to betray the other.” Genji sank his face into his forearms. “In the hospital I was just being hopeful, and we saw how that turned out.”

 

“When you near the surface, you feel exposed,” Zenyatta surmised. Genji budged his eyes a few centimeters past his own wrist. The watery shadows of many arms radiated on the sands around him.

 

“He is not beautiful like you, Master,” he whispered, and glanced over his shoulder. Zenyatta’s head was bowed, lone pair of hands clasped together in front of his chest.

 

“I think we will work up to it,” Zenyatta decided.

 

“Okay,” Genji surrendered with a flutter of his lights, dropping his head back into his folded arms.

 

Zenyatta mapped his body, stroking the hexed segments of padding, knuckling the tough scales of armor. His everyday ritual since they had fled civilization repeated again, “ _This is your body. Your leg. Your chest. Your face._ ” He rooted into nanomechanical flesh, informed Genji of its name-concept, and shared with Genji a blip of his vision. When he encountered Genji’s hand, Genji coiled his fingers around the intrusion and held him. Zenyatta did not resist. He touched the back of Genji’s head with his other hand. Genji released him.

 

As Zenyatta made tender fools of his armored ankles, Genji gazed down the beach at the apple tree, watching the monk’s precious scrap float in the wind, lighter by the second. The apples were small with yellow skins, their attendant leaves pale, translucent. A spider made her nest between one of the golden fruits and the branch. Soon the apple would fall, and the web would break. “ _This is your concentration, flying away_ ,” Zenyatta hummed.

 

He asked Genji to turn over. Raindrops bubbled across Genji’s eyes, blurring the world as if he was looking at it from under the river. Drowned happily in the water and never came up. Zenyatta’s warm hands flared against the mesh of his chest and turned him solid again. Once Genji relaxed, Zenyatta made fruitful grinds of his palm-heels up the flanks. Genji raised his arms over his head, extending a few fingers to caress his own cheek. His face fell toward the river. The sun was a half-crescent on clouded waters.

 

“I thought you said bodies are unimportant.”

 

“I do not believe that is something I have ever said,” Zenyatta said, gentle as the meeting of shallows and shore in Genji’s ears. “Yet I understand it may be something you have heard in my words.” He searched the green circle at the center of Genji. “What I said is that we are all one within the Iris. Bodies are temporary, and in the end, will not define us.” He tweezed a couple fingers under the corners of Genji’s breastplate, where it bolted to his chest. His hand emerged black with silt. He went to the river to wash, bringing back water to clean out the alcoves. As he poured, his lights dulled. “You have always disliked that idea.”

 

“Sounds like Buddhism,” Genji chuckled. “I am sure any disagreement is just some lingering doubt of mine. You will squash it eventually, and I will not even realize you did until we have this conversation again.” Zenyatta left to wash his hands a second time. Genji’s eyes made targeting halos around the drops of water falling from his fingers as he returned. “I hope that when I die, it is not so hard for me to find you next time.” Zenyatta knelt at his side, looking into the earnest pulse of his visor light. Lightning fanned across the atmosphere so high as to be fiery linkages between the stars, never touching ground.

 

The thunder hit strange, like a pressure drop, shaking the wet fragments of sunlight parked over Genji’s eyes. His body tensed painfully. Zenyatta touched the center of his throat and the rest of the reaction broke apart before it could fester. Genji felt the growl of the sand at his back and the weight of the wind on his chest again. All that remained was the weariness. He closed his eyes. “It is not that I am unwilling to put in the effort,” he laughed, and begged. “But I want to see you clearly, from the same place you see me.”

 

Zenyatta’s hand propped under the side of his jaw. Genji looked up obediently.

 

“You do not have to wait,” Zenyatta ordered, unyielding enough to suggest possession by his more commanding brother. “You are very strong. It is not a matter of perfect time or circumstance.”

 

 “I will try,” Genji promised. “For you.” Zenyatta shook his head, squeezing one of Genji’s antennae. Genji sat up, allowing him the opportunity to smooth his tangled ribbon.

 

“Are you comfortable now?” Zenyatta asked as he pressed the dragon’s tail straight with his thumbs. Genji leaned back on his hands.

 

“I feel wonderful.”

 

Zenyatta embraced him. They melded cheeks and fingers. They exchanged cupped palms to the backs of each other’s necks. Zenyatta brushed Genji’s silver scales, array darkening.

 

“This is what my brother calls a sacred place,” he said, and arrowed his fingertips to the back of Genji’s skull before drawing to the top of his shoulders. “Only those closest to you may touch it. It is our acknowledgement of the importance of our bodies, without which we could not meet the world. Having a boundary helps us learn what is respectful to us and what is not.” He tilted his head prospectively at Genji. “It is one of his older ideas, but I have always enjoyed it.”

 

“You don’t really protect that place.” Genji gestured to his red wire locked in by hollow metal honeycombs. “But I guess that’s the point. I like what you do with the rest. Your aesthetic.” He followed the lines with his hand to where they either split into deeper components or fed the cord belt hanging around Zenyatta’s hips. Unanswered connections now, long parted from whatever they originally plugged into. Genji poked back up at Zenyatta’s neck. “This place is ‘sacred’ where I come from too. But not in the same way I think.”

 

“Injury there may cause a human to die,” Zenyatta evaluated. Genji snorted. “It is sensual,” the monk added, and Genji quieted, nodding. Zenyatta’s voice wrinkled with amusement, “That seems to happen when things are declared sacred.”

 

“You learn so fast,” Genji praised. “It seems like Buddhism, Islam, and all the rest we have read from only talk about bodies as sources of corruption.” He aired the consternation from his electronic throat before continuing. “Or babies. I am sure if I went to the tourist temples in Japan and talked to some Shinto boys, it would be the same story. But I cannot make babies.”

 

“And I am not a Buddhist,” Zenyatta answered, much faster than Genji expected. The river shifted in the storm winds. “Maybe it was a mistake,” he continued, in the low voice that indicated a private thought shared. “To cloth ourselves, to imitate the relatable.”

 

“I like the way you are,” Genji interjected in Nepali. “I liked your clothes. It made me sad that you did not fight for them. I do not want anyone else to be like me.” Zenyatta lowered his head, lights softening, robin’s egg blue. He chopped the air with his hand.

 

“What I am is heartless,” he announced, restoring their conversation to its typical Japanese. He held up one finger. “I do not have a heart.” Genji sagged behind his arm with a hiss. Zenyatta peeled the blockage away. “Yet I am never far away, if that is what you fear. My path does not lie in commandment, Genji. If our readings, or my errors, have ever suggested otherwise, I must correct that perception.”

 

Zenyatta brought his hands together, not upright and stalwart in prayer, but wrapped low in front of his abdomen. “My goal has never been to lead you into such danger. I did not realize deserts could be hazardous places.” Genji clutched breathlessly at a laugh. Zenyatta perked at him, lights keen. “Shall we begin?”

 

Genji dropped onto his stomach, framing his shoulders and back to the sky. Masques of wet sand clung to his sides. Zenyatta applied a full hand to his back, one palm below his heart. Genji scrutinized the arrangement over his shoulder, flashing as he realized the monk’s designs on him.

 

“You must bring my sword,” he rasped, warm under his armor.

 

“What is the significance of that weapon?”

 

“Mr. Reyes made it to replace the one I lost.” As the statement sat between them, Genji played back his own voice. He shook his head. Zenyatta retracted his hand and threaded his fingers together, waiting. “The importance does not lie in the sword,” Genji admitted. “I only meant that, to use another person instead…that is like a sacred act.” His voice strangled itself.

 

“I see. I did not mean to cause disruption. I only wanted to avoid having you express yourself through violence.” Zenyatta searched the area with bird-like swivels of his head. “You said there was a time before swords.” Genji nodded. Zenyatta fished through the sand and plucked a rainbow from a thousand grains of silver. He showed it to Genji: a line of reflection that split the air. “Here. It is the silk of a spider’s web. Maybe it is a weapon, but it is also a home, and a shelter for new beginnings. Will it suffice?”

 

Genji propped himself on his elbow, staring at the silken cord. A drop of dew tumbled from its fractured end.

 

“Nevermind,” he corrected himself. “It’s fine.” He turned his face down, and raised his shoulders in offering. “Just use your hand.” It took a little while, but Zenyatta’s delicate frame of pressure returned to his back. Zen created a pyramid with his hands, his linked thumbs forming the base.

 

“All I would like you to do for now is come to me.”

 

The green dragon opened his eyes.

 

Fangs of molten lightning sank into Genji’s ribcage. He heaved, spine transformed from indifferent metal to a stream of volcanic bathwater. Zenyatta pushed into him with both hands, the only thing left in the world that was not on fire. “Come to me,” the monk ordered, and a coil of light swirled up his rooted arms, thickening as it swam across his chest, jawbones coalescing with a cavernous shriek beside his head. The exploding star writhed out of Genji’s back.

 

His whiskers flowed free from the sides of his snout. The mane down his back seesawed from keratinous spikes to drifts of hair floating in unseen waters. He slashed the fiery fan of his tail loose from his body and charged toward the storm clouds. Rain plummeted through his translucent green hide, scales shattering in infinite circles. He crashed into the wind, coils bunching against each other, bending around impossibly sharp angles as he screamed.

 

Out of the lonely world of ghosts, someone reached up to him. Someone solid and real. Someone warm, with a voice that sang to him, “ _There are no enemies here._ ” His head swung down in a crack of saber jaws, catching a stupid arm that twined too close.

 

It was one of many. The hands on his skin did not restrain him. They lifted.

 

Imperceptible at first, the thing below him dyed green through fingertips and wrists and indented biceps the longer it held contact. The neon dripped up all the way to its ringed shoulders, and dismembered into a void with a shadow sitting inside. The shadow had nine green eyes fixed on him, and passes of gold across its nebular surface. His belly grazed the knobby outcrops of the thing, and he realized the light shining out of its head was his own. Its entire existence was ordained to him. He released its arm, closing his mouth to a grit of fangs as his horns arched out from the back of his skull, frilly regalia lining his cheeks. “You need not crawl,” the shadow said, and he heard Zenyatta in it, ever at his side. “You can fly.”

 

The dragon rose from the ring of hands and tested a slow loop through the air, following the trail of stars already in orbit around Zenyatta’s head. He slid across the glass of the world, the only breeze on a great ocean. “Genji.” His body twitched to life: one of Zenyatta’s personal hands, a dark thing filled with gleams of metal, had traveled to the back of his neck. “Do you have any discomfort here?”

 

“No, Master,” Genji peeped, and Zenyatta sighed in multi-tonal relief. “Am I burning you?”

 

“You cannot burn me.”

 

Rain ceased to pierce the dragon’s hide. His movements turned silken, his scales lustrous, iridescing gold. For a moment, he even had a shadow.

 

Then his skin crackled away to mindless electricity, and his reflection-- grown across the whole river --kited out of existence. Genji’s chest tightened and the coolant devices in his shoulders popped, hissing out a superheated neon mist.

 

After some time Zenyatta’s fingers chipped against the canisters, and Genji wound them back in. He rolled on his side, facing his teacher, numb, nothing but a pulse of light. “It may be as simple as rewriting expectations,” Zenyatta theorized, switching from his kneel to a cross-legged seat just off the sand. “Practice,” he clarified. Genji stared at a handful of raindrops tenuously sticking to Zenyatta’s arm as they might to a man’s eyelashes. If he touched the water, it would evaporate. “Not just knowing you are free, but feeling it.” Zenyatta slid a hand around his own throat, his voice the sound of a smile.

 

Grains of sand floated off Genji’s arms as he sat up, eyes on the monk. “We will have to work on--”

 

“I do not want to work anymore today, Master.”

 

“I was speaking in a general sense,” Zenyatta agreed, amused. “I thought it would be fair as a weekly exploration. You may decide how far you would like to go.” He paused to allow Genji room to speak, and when nothing came from the cyborg, threw a ring of gold over him. “Rest,” he suggested.

 

“I do not want to rest right now,” Genji rebutted flatly. Zenyatta brought his hands together over his lap in a temple of fingertips. He leaned his head at the golden orb floating over Genji, then back at the uncompromising green glare of his visor.

 

“What do you want, my dearest friend?”

 

Thunder ghosted across the mountaintops for the last time. It was a gray world but for the cast of their LEDs.

 

Genji appealed his hands to the sides of Zenyatta’s tucked knee. Blue lights blinked. Zenyatta proffered his leg.

 

Undoing wires and clamps, Genji stripped Zenyatta’s sandals. He had thought it impossible. Zenyatta never removed them. But in the river, he had felt the gap with his finger. In that one moment, he had done something Zenyatta could not.

 

He laid the pair of sandal plates beside his pair of swords beneath the apple tree. He returned to Zenyatta emptied of all identity besides his face and mala. And it was only Genji silhouetted before him, the stamps and scripture on his body little more than scars. Zenyatta still floated with his legs stuck out straight above the earth, his head shifting quickly to follow Genji when he knelt upon the ground.

 

Genji took one of the bared feet in his hands, and pressed a handful of river to the sole. Zenyatta’s synth fluttered.

 

“Maybe you would like walking more if you used your own feet,” came Genji’s dagger through the fog. “There are lots of things to feel.” He bent forward and set his mask to the slip of gray bar between ankle and shin plate.

 

Zenyatta’s lights kindled in the gunmetal air, grading away from his crown like they were shining through steam. His other leg pinched upward at the knee. Genji dragged him closer to earth, pressing his face up his shin, and skipping high to land at his cheek.

 

“Yes,” Zenyatta urged, another self-surprising gasp, blue lights staining green. Genji seized him onto the sand and buried his face in neck cords. “Yes, my dear one. My Genji.” Hands flowed under Genji’s arms and bloomed over the back of his head. “Show me.” Genji counted the six banisters over Zenyatta’s breastplate. Zenyatta tipped his face back, bald crown grazing beds of new flowers. Genji clawed his hand over Zenyatta’s skull and fished up the shadow of his golden jaw. Zenyatta’s synth vibrated straight off his wired throat into Genji’s faceplate.

 

“You like your body?” Genji inquired as he rose over the point of Zenyatta’s chin to angle for a kiss. Zenyatta seized him by the sides of his face and clunked their foreheads together, portraits dyed by his pulsing turquoise.

 

“I could never teach you from a place of dishonesty,” he swore. Genji nudged him toward the correct slant for a kiss. They miscommunicated a few plastic knocks before Zenyatta held still and let Genji meet his seam, though they were chuckling against each other by then.

 

Zenyatta’s hands settled into a lotus on Genji’s heart.

 

“Have you been with somebody before?” Genji asked.

 

“Yes.” An emptying sigh of a word. Genji processed the response. He laid down at Zenyatta’s side, to give himself time.

 

“It is simple then,” he declared. He leaned to Zenyatta’s formless ear in whisper: “Remember how he touched you.”

 

Zenyatta pivoted to hug him. “I guess this is a touch,” Genji laughed.

 

“It was long ago,” Zenyatta said, reforming his mudra at Genji’s chest. Genji tipped a finger between their bowed faces at himself.

 

“Me too.” He bent across Zenyatta, stuck his entire hand between the poles protecting the monk’s abdominal column. The flower upon his heart cracked, and segmented fingers contracted upward into a tangle around his antennae. He could not smell anything but the clear river and the clouds on the metal beneath him.

 

The side of his face, the hawk-like overhang of his forehead guard, Genji used anything he could to grind irises on the hinge of Zenyatta’s jaw, and smother across the cording of his chassis. Omnic spheres snuck past him for the pasture of flower tops and tamarisk roots, crowning Zenyatta’s recline in a bronze crescent. Genji lashed forward, catching one in his fist, mashing the delicate lines into the sand. Zenyatta bucked underneath him, their chests holding together as Genji peeled the doorplate of the sphere back with his thumb.

 

“A river led me…” Zenyatta broadcast softly. “…to the monastery…” His hands slid down his column to the paneling between his legs. “Again and again…” he groaned in a many-pitched throb of synthetic vocals. Genji worried the corner of an eyeslot, and surveyed over his shoulder. Sunlight stole winks off the peaks of Zenyatta’s hips. A limp metallic penis reclined in the curve of his fingers. Soft, but gilded in dots of oil from base to tip, its webs of lubricant smearing across Zenyatta’s fingers like the spirals of a jellyfish dragged from water. That automated gel represented _compatibility_ : an omnium’s cynicism that survival required convenience. Required that Zenyatta spasm when a raindrop fell on his gathered cock.

 

“Keep going,” Genji instructed, relaxing his hand back into the crevices of Zenyatta’s stomach, turning his face to the monk’s and kissing him. Water steamed off his back. Zenyatta’s lights fired in scattered candle patterns, brief and white-hot. His body floated just off the earth, bare heels bouncing unevenly upon the sand. How many times had they met in morning caress? How many exercises had he completed in total gravity, never inspiring so much as an accidental reaction from either of them? Soulless machines. Or just his ignorance. Yet Zenyatta’s sensitivity did not surprise him either. After all--

 

Zenyatta laughed, euphoria shattering.

 

Genji withdrew his greedy talon from excavation of the chassis underplate. Zenyatta, as he had long known from sharing beds and patches of dirt with him across the whole world, was ticklish. It was sometimes worth a few chimes in the morning.

 

He realized he did not regret hearing them now. Zenyatta’s face rocked toward him, the wear along the central line of his plate seeming especially mirthful in the clouded air.

 

“It must be a beautiful memory,” Genji answered that figment of a smile. “Now can you try seeing me?” A motor whistled as Zenyatta tipped his head. “My body,” Genji elaborated. He took Zenyatta’s wrist and led wet fingers to his cream abdomen. “Here I am.” Zenyatta rephrased the interaction, spreading his hand up Genji’s chest.

 

“You are handsome, Genji,” he observed. Genji discovered he was ticklish too.

 

“Be careful,” he laughed. “You make me feel very manly.” He clapped his hand over his bicep. “But too much…” He leaned down. “…and I’ll carry you away, Zen.” Genji repositioned between silver arches, grazing underneath Zenyatta’s thighs with the red lines of his own. His hand rested aside Zenyatta’s head while he watched the monk return to his own body. When Zenyatta plotted the elastic of his emergence slit, he turned his face against Genji’s thumb.

 

“Genji…”

 

Genji perked, glancing across the river. It was not that he detected anything. He surveyed the riverbank with the glare of a hawk that had landed his dove, knowing that for the sake of starvation he too was grounded and wingless. Someone had told him he did not trust the world, but that was nonsense. The sheep walk remained empty. A blue spider sat on an apple skin and waited for guests. A single bird in the grass on the far shore caught a song, clutching furtively to the notes. “Genji…” The character of Zenyatta’s manipulations changed, streamed lower, feathering the second slit in his gray matte. Genji deactivated and filtered aside the nanofiber taping his groin, jerking upright on his knees as he pushed out. He gazed down at himself, then at the leaf-shape Zenyatta had kneaded up from his simple line of entry. Arousal gave it a slight fold, not quite labial, or puckered. Compatible.

 

He backed up and lowered his face to spark along Zenyatta’s thigh, pausing beside the churning glints of his fingers. There was a glow whenever Zenyatta’s orbit stretched apart the dip in the opening. Genji eyed the cock above. The head was a silver suggestion more than a well-defined feature. Topography on the sides mimicked the ridging of veins, maybe nanites even threw a pulse through it, but the patterns did not match organic branching or color dark little mazes under the surface.

 

Zenyatta sat up after a long silence from Genji, looking down his own stomach at the cyborg. Genji waved at his helmet.

 

“I was just thinking that if I took this off, I could blow you.”

 

“You need not remove your face for my sake, Genji,” Zenyatta sighed.

 

“I don’t mind,” Genji snickered back. “The part underneath has its uses.” His visor light narrowed across the stripe of exposed parts sitting between Zenyatta’s thighs. “Maybe later,” he acquiesced, and lined his middle finger into the opening.

 

Zenyatta made a noise he had never heard before.

 

Guilt rattled across the pan of Genji’s mind. While he worked at evincing more of those healing sounds, he reviewed the impulse. Deeper down it was a notion of neglect, a knife of remorse. Unhelpful. He swam past the feelings. Automated contractions milked the varying numbers of fingers he provided, and Zenyatta’s entire frame choked at the loss when he popped free. Genji sat up and grasped Zenyatta under the knees, holding him apart. He showed him his uninitiated prosthetic, a base gray shaft of human aspiration, coated by omnic convenience.

 

The plug in front of his tip was shiny with lubricant, but colorless moth wing flutters moved through Zenyatta’s array. Genji blinked response. He lifted his alignment, budging his length over the top of its counterpart. A flick of his hips thrust him across the match. Zenyatta shot a wing of blue-white onto the partitions of his stomach. It had an oily gold sheen, like melted down pearls.

 

Genji perched above the mess, a watery thread pumping from the tip of his cock and tracking downward to dilute Zenyatta’s mistake. “Is it hot?” he wondered, citing the classical complaint from a lifetime past.

 

Zenyatta’s face hung to one side. He squeezed a hand into a fist in front of his chest, fanning the other against his cheek. “It’s okay,” Genji cooed. Zenyatta shook his head, though it did not strike Genji as disagreement.

 

“I am in love with you,” Zenyatta exclaimed. More emphatic Japanese, a high-pitched revelation as sudden as _You are handsome_ or recalling he could feel pleasure with something as temporary and extraneous as a body. Genji shifted to Nepali, though he was no longer sure it was the most respectful language.

 

“I know, Zen,” he answered. “I could feel it before, in that place with no boundaries.” Zenyatta’s lights saturated blue, beating their luminescence out of his skull. “But I have known since long before that. Don’t you tell me every day?” Zenyatta sat up, wreathing Genji’s neck in his arms. They were thin and silver, they could break from forces far less fantastical than a raging dragon’s jaw. “I love you. May I tell you?”

 

Zenyatta nodded. Genji kissed him while he penetrated the swollen drop of the opening.

 

Sun in his eyes, a wound in the fog. He could polarize against it but he did not care that he was blind. His head tipped back, hands losing their confident bondage of Zenyatta’s legs. He was driving his fingers against his jaw and cheek. His forearms braced around Zenyatta’s resting place, grasping handfuls of stem and earth.

 

Zenyatta rose enough to check over his shoulder, resting his chin. Zenyatta stroked the sloping roads of his back. Zenyatta pooled down his hips, fingers curling under the cheek of his rump and tugging him in where he had slowed in shock. His body responded with instinctive jackknifes against the plug. It was not the nightmare of having to learn how to carefully align and push. It was human, endocrine, rising from his gut.

 

And Zenyatta had overtaken him, warm and weighty, memory-erasing velvet or a sorcerer’s spell. Genji was going to forget who he was, but he did not want for anything. The fog had come into his mind. At the corner of his whiteout eyes, he saw Zenyatta fanning his arms out to the sides and silver hands ticking into focusing gestures. He rammed his fingers clumsily under the monk’s back and ended up threaded into bundles of wiring, the only surfaces he did not slip off of. Zenyatta cried out in his arms, a hopelessly broken noise. _I am sorry I did not understand you._

 

He moaned reply, pumping the opening, unsticking his fingers one at a time. Zenyatta was able to settle, his mudras holding, his eyelights washed completely green. Genji supposed he could not blame him. It was a kind of meditation. It even had a rhythm to follow, a line of stars through the cosmos. If he let Zenyatta follow that path, he might even come back with new tales of the world beyond, and the Iris harmonizing the universe.

 

Instead Genji drew all the way out, and spearheaded into the slit, faster, unrelentingly deep.

 

Zenyatta gasped back to the surface of the water, grabbing at Genji’s hips as they worked. “This is your body,” Genji drawled, and Zenyatta moaned static. Genji rocked his hindquarters from side to side, stoppering his thrusts to little dabs of his tip. “Remember now?” he teased.

 

Zenyatta’s face snapped toward him. Genji tensed. He reared up, but Zenyatta snared the base of his ribbon, snapping it tight. He froze obediently. Zenyatta’s other hand crawled over his shoulder, and the monk lifted himself.

 

_Click._

Genji’s light blinked. He dared budge his chin down, strain his ribbon, and investigate. Zenyatta was at his chest, pushing his jaw uncertainly against one of the chrome wings, scaling up from there to the cords around his throat. Bumping blindly, warm dots of pressure. Trying to learn.

 

Genji shivered. Zenyatta had retracted his manhood to keep their hard abdomens from smashing it. He reached past the semi-flowered blue neon of the opening that remained and took Genji in his hand. Genji hissed down on his knees. His prosthetic was striped by green bars, the head nearly subsumed in wet light. When Zenyatta traced over it, a glowing flicker chased the pressure lines. Genji hung his head, hips twitching at the monk’s fingers. Zenyatta touched the chrome bevel of his chin with his faceplate.

 

Another hand glided into the lip of one of his torso vents, retracting all fingers but one, dragging the side along the corner and teasing until Genji heaved against Zenyatta’s hand. “I can still feel you holding me up,” he exhaled. “You are everywhere. I want to feel like that again. That’s why--” His pitch rose as he restrained himself. “I’m sorry he bit you.” Zenyatta patted Genji’s cock against his plug, slid him along the edge to loosen the opening’s burden of oils. He directed the tip up and touched Genji to his emergence, where his own shaft could push back out as soon as it was safe from Genji’s sloppy thrusting.

 

Genji shadowed his visor with one hand. His voice dried. “I am going to cum too fast…if you actually keep holding me.”

 

“You enjoy this more?” Zenyatta asked.

 

“I want to be good,” he wheezed back. He spread his knees even if it made him ache at the current center of his body. “You want to try the other way around?” He lifted one of his hands from their eternal penitence in the dirt and spun his finger in a loop.

 

“Maybe next time,” Zenyatta echoed in deep amusement. Genji’s light darkened as he considered his cock trembling atop that circle-etched palm.

 

“But…”

 

Zenyatta retreated his fingertips like a veil of silk. Genji’s penis throbbed in the empty air, millimeters off the heat he had taken for granted. Zenyatta sat back on his elbows and tilted his head. “Try turning on your side?” Genji prompted, and Zenyatta obeyed. “Maybe I will not lose as fast this way,” he said as he looked down the spindly, segmented back, spine standing out in the fog like an IV drip of blood. Old sword cuts scratched the hull. Genji snugged in behind Zenyatta, lifting his leg for access.

 

“Genji,” Zenyatta murmured. Genji had lodged his tip in the right spot, and peeked over Zenyatta’s shoulder questioningly. “How may I see your face like this?” Zenyatta asked. Genji flickered. He dropped Zenyatta’s leg and used his hand to turn the monk’s shoulder back. Zenyatta brightened as their faces touched together.

 

Had he been here before? He was inside Zenyatta and pressure built in the back of his head. Genji thought it might be some lingering nausea, or that he was going to lose the experience to a blind, pointless panic. But it broke over him warm: nostalgia, the impossible feeling. His and Zenyatta’s faces gleamed as the sun came through the end of the storm. The river was louder in his ears than anything, even Zenyatta calling his name. Zenyatta’s hands relaxed over his head, or drew into sharp focus as they swayed past Genji’s cheek in entranced appreciation.

 

A river. McCree? It had only been the car, and there had been ads, not wilderness. The train went by in an electric stream, but it was the dead of night. Someone from earlier? He could not remember a river. He had always been in secret but notably artificial places by necessity. The first time he let a guy fuck him was in a bathroom, after weeks of courting by his best friend. Because he could not take the pressure, because he wanted his friend to see. He could remember the text he sent ( _at imai station toilet come see_ ) but not his friend’s face. And it had hurt so much, but he still smiled when the other boy walked in.

 

The first time he tried making love to his girlfriend had been in his own bed, and they had to be quiet as mice to not alert the guards. Maybe Hanzo heard from across the hall, but Genji had never asked about that. He recalled a couple more girls down the hill from a festival, and another squatting with him in the shadows, waiting for the arcade attendant to finish locking up and leave. The strangest memory was one of the ones where he had been too drunk to remember who or what he had been doing beyond a few mediocre gropes, and the other party wisely escaped the grounds so all Genji got to wake up to was Hanzo freaking out for no reason. And Hanzo lied to Father about it.

 

Never by a river, yet Genji felt embraced by the familiar. Zenyatta was linking their hands for the hundredth or thousandth time. Occasionally the wind scraped Genji’s leg. Sometimes few spent drops of rain fell from the branches into his vents and he understood why Zenyatta had jumped. Crisp, syrupy fragrances of shrubs too green to be tamarisk cut into him. The mulchy ooze of maple leaves rotting in the rain followed, as he walked a path he could not see. Round white mushrooms drummed when the water struck their cups. Panels of silk slipped away beneath his hands.

 

Dragon-capable coolant ejected over his shoulders, and his chest panted slower against Zenyatta’s side.

 

Zen gave his fingers a waking squeeze. Genji became cognizant enough to drag himself out, though the trailing splash of hot fluid on his thighs gave him another erection. He ignored it, and fondled his way over Zenyatta’s anatomy until he found the emergence and coaxed the monk out. He explored the limp body, pulled on the base, and when Zenyatta hardened, Genji made him squirt another thread right onto the beach after a couple minutes.

 

The notion of a history, an importance to the event, faded. Zenyatta was blue-lit as Genji stirred against him. He turned on his side, started to leave the ground, and Genji restrained him with an arm. The sun was out and it baked the water off their legs. Genji looked at the swirl of liquid diamond sinking into the sand in front of Zenyatta’s hips.

 

“Does it-- is there pollution? I did not mean to make you…” he asked, waving at the spend. Zenyatta’s head adjusted slightly to follow his gesture.

 

“It will be gone in time.” The luminescence in the fluid was already fading. Zenyatta looked back at him. “Do you have any interest in reading the manual the doctor gave you yet?” Genji shook his head quickly. Zenyatta chuckled, and rolled back over.

 

“I am supposed to send him data,” Genji noted. He transmitted the encrypted file to Zenyatta. “Can you approve it?” Zenyatta stamped the file effortlessly with his Net ID and returned it. Genji dumped the data to Oberon, attaching a message, though he regretted it after:

 

_karroten: I did not masturbate first like you asked, I just sort of went for it._

_OBsvc6002: It is no trouble at all Genji. Life does not always happen the way we doctors would like. I cannot very well keep you in a jar. I am with a client right now, but I have reviewed the data and as soon as we both have the opportunity we can chat!_

“Thanks,” Genji mumbled at Zenyatta. Then he realized the potential of the word. “Not for the sex!” The potential of _words._ “No, it was still good…” He covered his head with his hands. “I never talked to them after before!” he confessed.

 

“My friend,” Zenyatta said as he sat up, and Genji peered skyward. Zenyatta flashed at him. “It was fun.”

 

Genji sighed. Zenyatta drew up one of his arms, inspecting it. Genji followed his gaze, and then looked down at himself.

 

They were filthy, covered in sand. They had been lying in the sun long enough that the center of each patch was muddy, but the edges crusted over dry and cracked like million-year-old deserts. Genji could feel it now, scrabbling down his back, itching the insides of his thighs. Zenyatta had a big smudge on the side of his face when he met Genji’s eyes.

 

They laughed, and entered the river.

 

“Did you fear our work today?” Zenyatta asked as he wetted Genji’s ribbon and squeezed it out in sections between his hands. Genji looked up from a shoulder he was detailing by fingertip.

 

“It was not fear,” he said, and dropped back to his work. “It is the Shimada in me.” Zenyatta released the ribbon so that it swayed across the water, away from entanglement. “Remember in Japan, when I made you wait outside the forest?”

 

“It was a beautiful place.” Zenyatta was returned there by his own words, voice trembling in reverence.

 

“You bring your wife into the forest and lay with her there,” Genji explained. “If the dragon touches her with you, she can make your heir.” He poured the river down Zenyatta’s back, and sparks of sand spiraled out across the current. “It seems in reality, you do not need to be in that place. And I guess you do not even need to be having sex…though…” He shook his head. “I will never have an heir. It is just another case of bad storytelling.”

 

Genji ticked his visor bright, like a smile.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter:** I feel neither joy nor remorse amidst such death.
>   * This is my formal apology to anyone who reads this story regularly: sorry!!! There was a foreseeable (work-related) delay on this chapter, and I should have put a note about it in the last chapter. I actually had the skeleton of this one ready when the last chapter was finished and thought I could complete it before the craziness set in, but that did not happen.
>   * This story is one year old. Happy birthday! Let's try to to keep our update ratio from here out to at least once a month...okay...? (ι´Д｀)ﾉ
>   * Moira!!!! With every announcement this story falls further from the Overwatch canon, but I am glad there is some more information re:Reaper now. Zenyatta also dunks on her in their PTR interaction so all is well. At one of the Blizzcon panels Michael Chu indicated McCree and Genji might have some interactions revealing their opinions of her, but they don't seem to be on PTR yet if they exist.
>   * _Harajuku_ \- A district in Tokyo, known for youth street fashion. Many of the magazines that made Harajuku famous have gone electronic only or stopped printing altogether, but Overwatch is a hopeful vision of the future.
>   * "Pachimari is a highly dignified character loved and understood by all ages equally." - Genji Shimada, at age 30
>   * Please don't play in rivers during thunderstorms, I don't care how far away the thunder is.
>   * _tamarisk_ \- aka salt cedar, a genus of short, sprawling trees/shrubs with scale-like leaves and pink flowers
>   * _jataka_ \- stories concerning the previous lives of Gautama Buddha
>   * _Prince Sattva_ \- an ascetic who throws himself from a cliff to feed a starving tiger and her cubs with his own body
>   * _Rathasena_ \- a boy who uses gambling and tricks to free his mother and her eleven sisters, who were imprisoned in a cave and rendered blind
>   * Shinto is the ethnic religion of Japan, though most Japanese will pray to Shinto shrines and participate in festivals without identifying as Shintoists. In the organized form of Shinto, female priests are very rare (they were banned until 1945).
>   * The Japanese language has multiple ways to say "I love you", with differing levels of earnestness, as well as modifiers that can make the phrase more serious or casual. It is possible to say "I love you" without it meaning very much, it is also possible to use particular phrases or emphasis to indicate that you want to marry or spend your life with someone.
>   * In Nepali language, there are two clear words for love that are only used for other people (there is no way to say "I love pizza!", you can only "like" pizza). One word (माया maya) references unconditional love, the other (प्रेम prem) is for romantic love. Either word is considered very serious to use, and generally reserved for established relationships. For simple confessions it is better to use phrases that indicate you "really like" someone, even if this would sound strange if you said it in a straight English translation.
> 



	19. Feedback Loop

 

Red beetles with samurai helmets charged down a frostbitten branch at each other.

 

Genji placed the walls of his hands between them. “Desist,” he whispered, though to the insects it must have been the terrible shout of a jade emperor in the sky. His regal glare traveled from one glossy wingcase to the other. The beetles tried climbing over his fingers. Each was big enough to fill his entire palm. He plucked away the left specimen and set him higher up the branch, beside another beetle without a helmet or a special shine. “Look, your wife is here.” The wild-eyed ronin clambered over his betrothed-- not for romance, but to challenge the other male once more. Genji shuffled down the branch and seized the other beetle, laying him on an entirely different stalk of the leafless tree, beside a different female. “Do you not believe in love?” he accused both warriors. The repositioned male crooked his horns around the female and flipped her off the branch for getting in his way. Genji held his cheeks as he watched her flop to the snow on her back.

 

“Genji!” a voice called through the woods, following his name with words he did not know, but a tone he recognized. Genji used a rock to prop the female beetle at a better angle for righting herself. He walked from the bony shroud of the sleeping forest, feet landing on an iced over beach.

 

They had made it to India, but they kept following rivers until they tumbled into the sea.

 

A woman fifteen or twenty years older than he would be now, if time had not stopped, grinned as she spotted him. She was bundling silver-black hair in a knot over her neck. She turned her back to him, the muscle of her shoulders fanned in taut anatomical relief beneath wrinkles of brown skin. A drysuit bagged around her limbs. The zipper was down to the middle of her back, a pink bikini tether tying off well above the part. Genji clasped her shoulder and zipped her up while she smiled at him from the corner of her dark eye.

 

She stepped away from him with a rustle of bellflower rising from her hair, and entered the open hutch of a massive violet mech. It was an older model, with a spine strap that descended to fit the drysuit, and a plastic cup that latched onto the back of her skull. An octopus of tubing settled around her cheeks as her mask flickered into place. Her login displayed briefly on the booting HUD: _Sri._ Further tentacles tied around her waist, generating a thermal shield.

 

Out of the mech’s shoulder rose a small turquoise drone shaped like a krill, with the tapering fins of a flying fish. It cruised a circle overhead, pipping at regular intervals. White tallies scratched the length of its tail shell. Sri studied the data lines pouring across her mask. She gestured at Genji with the mech’s massive quartet-claws when she was ready, and twisted her exoskeleton toward the sea.

 

Genji hooked his hands under the hem of his weathered black shirt. The nanofiber tugged over his head remained supple, but the cheap decal had faded to scatters of pink and green rising away from his chest. He pinned the shirt to the snowpack with a rock, and retrieved a heavy burlap bag and a pink bodyboard from a cage on the mech’s back. He hooked the board under his armpit, and tied the bag strings around his neck, a hobo’s cape covering his swords.

 

They entered the ocean. As soon as they cleared the shallows, the mech’s rear boosters activated and it began skimming across the water. Genji lay on the board and paddled alongside, cresting over lazy little toppling waves. Skyscraper obelisks hovered on the margin between sea and sky, pale green stomachs radiating open to eat the water. Sparks of salt frothed in the spotlights. Kanji calligraphed each obelisk’s name several stories high on its coral hull: _SUN, MOON, STARS_ , and the like. Snowy cliffs and titanic chunks of black rock ringed the immediate cove, forming an illusion of protection from the blocks of the universe.

 

Upon one of the burnt skull rocks a single sakura tree bent in the wind, its snaking branches bare but for the thinnest feathers of a new year.

 

Sri snapped a fishline tether from her mech arm to the bullnose ring on the tip of Genji’s board, and her jet lights burned to transparency, firing the mech toward the center of the cove. Genji dabbled his hand in the dark gray water blurring by, writing his own white scars in the mirror. He laid his head down, and limited his senses to the static of the parting ocean, the foam cold in his hand, and the dream of how quickly he would part from her the moment he let go.

 

Lanterns in the deep roused him. Iron ziggurats climbed through the water, rooted in jungles of broken wire. Sri’s mech quit its candlelight boosters. She took the bodyboard from him and hitched it on the mech’s back. He dove with her to the ocean floor. A second drone detached from her other shoulder, buoying to the surface with its conical shell. It made its lonely keep on the winter sea, watching for boats to warn.

 

Sri activated lasers on the mech’s forearms and cut into an omnic strider collapsed on an underwater slope. Ripples of inert legs cached along each flank of her target, individual limbs as big as a man. Genji swam around the top of same slope, picking up plastic bags from an age long before omnics and stuffing them in his burlap. Sri piped her radio feed to him while they worked, mostly the mezzos and electronic pianos of trance artists singing lullabies to other worlds. She carved off the gun barrels mounted across the strider’s face. Boosting the mech a couple meters forward to the jaw hinge, she worked on skinning its cranial plate.

 

She told Genji a story about a dog she had as a child, when she lived in Jakarta. The dog fell from one of the hardlight suspension bridges locked between the city’s floating towers. He plummeted into the sea, and she was told she would never see him again. The story caught on in the news, and the conversation became _what if it were a child_ , leading to the installation of new bridge barriers. “But I was so angry at the news streamers,” she said, “For treating my dog like a hypothetical.”

 

Genji told her about the cat stilts holding up Tokyo, and she laughed at him. Why evade the sea with legs that would inevitably have to grow, when the whole city could be rocket-powered, and fly wherever it wanted? He agreed. She said that just as the news cycle blew over, the coast guard found the dog on the remains of one of the beaches below, playing with palm fronds and eating crabs, completely without injury.

 

The eye discs of Sri’s krill drone flooded red. Its hazard light caught Genji in bloody silhouette. He reached one hand over his sword hilt. Grainy klaxons swelled through the water. Kicking off the rim of a submerged bathtub, Genji swam to the mech. The drone approached a barnacle-studded depression at the hinge of the strider faceplate. A dark blue ball rolled out of the abyss, a forest of plugs popping from its surface. Genji relaxed his hand from his katana; there was nothing he could do about this kind of relic.

 

Newborn lights clustered lamp yellow around the top of the sphere, flashing rapidly. Sri crossed the mech arms, generating a bubble shield. Genji balanced himself with a hand over her shoulder as he watched the circular mine.

 

Sri’s drone scanned the side, identifying a gap just short of the groping yellow ghosts spinning around the top. It swam down to land an array of ten pointy legs on the mine’s flank. Iridescent wiring spit from its nose and sank into the gap. Electric neon wings clicked to different stations as it worked, a slow-motion shadow of flight above the dark metal. Genji smelled thick fossil bile in the water: the gap was a wound, rendered by the same cannon shot that pierced the strider’s central processor. Rainbows seeped upward into the questing sunlight.

 

The mine’s eyes went dark. The drone whizzed back to Sri, swimming through the shield and attaching to her fleshy suited shoulder. Sri buzzed into her comms, and a ship drifted in overhead. It summoned the inactive mine from the water with an alien beam. She used the mech’s finger to scribe another tally onto her drone’s tail.

 

They returned to business. Sri disassembled the fallen omnic.

 

Genji extruded the knuckles of his shuriken to cut a fish from a hooped nest of soda holders. When she did not move, he lifted her to the sun’s vague halo. She twisted her body weakly, a crumpling leaf of rusted iron. He caught her again and kicked out of the debris field. Sri’s query popped across his feed as he wound through four-legged towers with buttresses of missile tubes and drooping gates of piled garbage. He asked for coordinates, and collected the fish to the warm hollow of his chest. She struggled much harder in his hand than when he had let her loose to die.

 

His path led past a neighborhood of old houses and stores, holes in roofs where the omnics had stumbled through. He could still read the sign on one of the stores next to a now superfluous dock: _Ranshima Lucky Fishing – Catch the Big One!_ Everlasting sconces from Sri’s crew gridded an overlay across the terrain, but he could not see through the knots of oysters clogging the dark windows and doors. The far end of the village sank on an ancient fault. He followed the extended corpse of a playground to the bottom of a cliff, where another of the brightly crayoned mechs was taking apart a bus-length railgun. At the mech’s feet, Zenyatta picked up an omnicode flag, the machine language still flickering and shifting on the fabric.

 

A krill drone met Genji as he neared, landing on his head a few seconds. It detached with a vibrating beep. Zenyatta turned toward him, perking blue when he held out his occupied hands. The monk wore his shirt even on clean-up, it curtained out around him like dove wings constantly unfolding from his body. Naturally, the reward for his carelessness was that his Lúcio decal had not dimmed at all.

 

Zenyatta’s golden caress slid through the water, unimpeded by the viscosity of his medium, coalescing a little star in the center of the battlefield.

 

The fish flicked her powerful tail and swirled away through the dark ocean.

 

Zenyatta resumed bundling the flag in his arms, and bent to search for the bag he had left further back on the ocean floor. Genji hugged him, and dashed back up the cliff with a brilliant light flowing through his body.

 

The green glow tempered as he surveyed other creatures trapped on the drowned village streets. Piled together in twitches of starvation, or swimming slowly with wires spoked through their muscles. Gill flaps stretched open under plastic screens. Genji oriented on the lights of Sri’s mech to return to his grid. They had been working the cove for weeks already.

 

 _**SYSTEM MESSAGE**:_ _docholly12 sent file [itshighnoon.omn]._

_karroten: Stop texting me when you are drunk._

_docholly12: this is 100% sober_

_karroten: Then why did you send it?_

Silence for a while.

 

_docholly12: thought you could use a laugh to remember me by_

Genji kept peeking at the file, sniggering while he gathered trash, but he did not tell Jesse about that. In the end his burlap trailed behind him coelacanth-style, brown and lumpy, full of ancient bones. Sri balanced him and his treasure on the mech’s wrists when she was ready to jet in. Genji dozed on the return trip too.

 

He passed off his debris to digestion units waiting on the beach. They repeated the process all the way to early evening.

 

Sri was talking to someone on comms, and she still had to detach from the mech, so Genji headed on alone. Humans ran by half out of their drysuits, and omnics ran with them, imitating their shrieks of outrage at the temperature. Men swooned as they passed the shielding element around the shower unit, cheeks like apples. Omnics groaned from the stalls around Genji as they dug salt from their joints. One tapped his butt as he passed, “Good job out there!” He took the far stall, which had a view of the beach beyond the exit. Spools of oil unwound from his armor, fading a spectrum around the drain.

 

He watched members of the beach crew inflate a couple round pools beside each other. The rubbery yellow pool plastic was tattooed with PORT*SPRING and a cartoon cat bearing an umbrella, inexplicably happy to be doused in rain. Some newly recruited students from Hokkaido University dumped a few teabags’ worth of metallic grains into the left pool. They leaned over the rim, and raised their arms in _banzai!_ as a spring of steamy water flowered from the center. Shower towels flew off and bodies hopped in, sinking to their chins with wails of bubbly delight that brightened Genji’s visor. Only after everyone was nested in the heat did anyone think to erect the screen between men and women.

 

The other pool received a half-and-half of packets, water and oil. One of the omnics carefully arranged the gendering screen before various units clambered over the edge and into the steam.

 

Genji rocked against the wall under the shower faucet, turning over a laugh in his chest. A lonely footstep on the tile answered him, and he hung his head out to see who it was. Sri, shimmying from her drysuit, empty sleeves sprouting off her waist like extra arms, pushed her way into his stall. She dropped the drysuit in the corner. He could see the goosebumps riding up her thighs.

 

“You cold?” he asked, reaching out to encircle her hands.

 

“You are warm,” she answered, retreating from him and raising the lines of her bikini with her thumbs. With her gray hair soaking wet, she reminded him of Amari.

 

Someone else had followed Sri into the shower. Genji allowed the shadow to play out. Sri lurched away from an unfamiliar patter across her toes, and he bent down to swipe a heart-colored beetle from the soaked tile before she could stomp on it. Her arms popped up in a defensive cross, and she backed away until she got a clear look through the steam at the samurai. The beetle sat placidly in Genji’s palm, water jeweling his shell.

 

“You can make a Christmas wish,” Genji suggested. Sri’s lips creased. “Though I guess it is a little late. This one we call santa beetle. He’s made,” he added, meaning engineered. “But on this island, they pretend like he has always been here. He comes out in winter. I think today, maybe, he got cold…” He lifted the beetle out from the track of the shower faucet, and the beetle climbed to the side of his hand closer to the heated water. “I never saw Santa in-person before we came here,” he snickered, and Sri grumbled under her breath. “Sapporo was never my kind of town. Though that was an inheritance from Hanzo, who said it was too much like Hanamura. No better reason to hate a place.

 

She smiled at him. Genji peeked up-- she was taller than him, when they both stood on a plain of tiles like this. “Why did we leave Jakarta?” he asked. It had been warmer. The sea was stuffed with omnics there too. Sri needled the corner of her lip with her canine tooth as she considered a translation. Her English was much better than his own, but they both got stuck on the strangest words at times.

 

“Optics,” she ventured, pointing at her eye, then working her finger like a camera shutter. “In the media, Japan is more important right now. We get more donations.”

 

“Hey~” Genji hung his wonder in the air. He ran his finger along the beetle’s horn, but the insect remained still. “Japan is important?”

 

“There was an attack on omnics in Tokyo,” she said, and his visor reflection scalded across her face. “A photo got circulated that shows…” She tried to get out of the shower at her phone. He took her shoulder, reining her back, keeping her in the superheated cloister a while longer. His expression must have changed somehow, because she tilted her head, and prompted him, “What is it?”

 

“I always thought Tokyo was friendly to omnics,” he murmured. “I thought maybe, all of Japan was. That it was a better place for them, aside from a few of the backwaters.” Sri shook her head.

 

“It was not the humans living there. It was Talon, though I heard some were also caught when the security forces arrived.” Her hand set on his breastplate. “That is what they do. They try to break people, make them forget.”

 

“Forget?”

 

She looked out, towards the sea beyond the confines of the shower.

 

“I said I was angry at the news about the dog.” Sri’s grin took over her whole face, etching her laugh lines. Genji watched her pupils constrict, the little wind-up and snap of her eye muscles as she blinked. “But maybe I used him as an example too. By falling off a bridge, my dog changed the world. I became aware that there were people beyond my family.” She held out her hand, and their fingers laced together, metal sliding past as easy as skin. “Strangers who cared. Like every person was potentially my friend.”

 

They separated. She flipped her hands back through her hair. Bellflowers again, a garden in his shower stall. “There is nothing we can do about Talon. But because of that photo, it may not turn out like they hoped. And what we do here is show everyone working together to heal old wounds, and the consequences of not remembering the past.”

 

“I did not even know the Crisis came so close to my home,” he offered. Sri’s gaze was a warm tar to get stuck in. She took a step back, turning her head to pool her hair at one side, and running her fingers along the bared shell of her ear.

 

“Not exactly,” she corrected. “The ones out there were fleeing Russia. The damage to the rest of the island was from Russian hunters. It was a big international incident.” Genji shrugged. “I guess in the Crisis, it is easy to forget everything else.” She shaded her eyes at him. “Or you are much younger than I thought.” Genji flashed to attention.

 

“I am just ignorant!” he confessed. “Anyway, this santa…” He held the beetle up to her face. Sri’s shoulders rose, but she could not be stirred into flight. The beetle flapped his wings in the warm water. “He seems nice now, but if he sees a girl, he turns very naughty!” Sri blinked at the insect a few times, and her eyes narrowed over him, at Genji.

 

“Genji…” She inhaled, holding her breath, but not finding better words. “Your chat is terrible!” She exited the shower. He stepped out after her, watching her tie herself in a towel and rush to the springs, yipping when she hit the cold. He carried the beetle out to the forest, then looked for Zenyatta.

 

Sometimes the monk did not embrace the post-work rituals, but today Genji spotted a shiny bald spot wedged between two huge industrial omnics. Zenyatta lay sunken into the bath with a peach towel folded over his lights. One of the industrial models swiveled his bar-eyed head at the seemingly dozing monk, and tested one of the rotating mala spheres with the edge of his thumb. Zenyatta stirred and looked up to him, and their lights flicked to one-another in quick bursts.

 

Genji slid into the bath on the opposite end, handing off his t-shirt and towel to the evening’s designated launderer. The oil swam up the fissures of his body and steamed out the lingering tightness of the day. He lined his elbows on the rim of the pool and dropped his head back with a grunt, summoning giggles from the neighboring omnics. Someone switched on the news, a holoscreen unfolding along the beach large enough to be shared by both pools. Genji activated a sliver of his visor to review blurry lights reflecting across the islands of his knees, then burrowed his head into his shoulder and shut off again.

 

“Genji.” Zenyatta’s voice drifted through him. Genji could smell the supply truck that arrived at the back of the camp, filtered sulfur in its jets, frozen fish packs carted out its doors. The honeyed caramel-sweet of beer caught in mugs at the other pool. Genji looked over his shoulder at the winks of heavy glass. Some of the humans ate tofu sticks instead of fish, but they all drank beer. “Your doctor is on the news,” Zenyatta said.

 

“Angela?” He twisted toward the screen.

 

An interview took place against the pink archways and eight-point marble stars of Oasis. The subject was an old man in black hornrims, framed by the vines and puckering buds of an open air garden flowering in the low sun. Behind him stood a much younger and stouter man enveloped in the many white arms of a drone that hovered on rings of energy. The drone’s eye was marked by an enormous blue spotlight. It held one of the young man’s hands in a tentacular arm, its other tendrils seeping around his shoulders and back, iridescent wires threading through the rich artwork of his beard. Genji recognized the two men as Dr. Hassoun and his shadow, Al-Zahabi.

 

“Minister, I understand your students conducted the refurbishing, despite most of them not having a background in robotics?” the interviewer asked.

 

“Well that is simplifying,” Dr. Hassoun laughed, knocking a bumpy knuckle into the curve of his glasses. “Every student learns basic omnicoding and nanomechanics-- how could they not, when these are ubiquitous elements of our society and our natural world? The Ministry’s specialization is not its limitation. But yes, I thought it was a fitting challenge.” He looked away from the glare of the camera light, all around him at the recently misted flowers. “And for some reason the students wanted someone to take over caretaker duties.” Genji never saw the doctor laugh even once in Angela’s company, though he had not known him long. Hassoun looked like a different person. He lost years off his crow’s feet.

 

“Can you describe your first encounter with the unit?”

 

“I cannot go into the details of our security system here, but I can say I received a request to investigate an unknown machine that climbed into the lake. We rapidly discovered the unit was docile, and unfortunately soon after my students gave it a name. Despite my best efforts many of them remain sentimental.” His smile was smaller this time. “Of course, the unit’s behavior was unique, and thus uniquely endearing, I suppose.” Hassoun glanced over his shoulder at Al-Zahabi, who blushed. “Before we could move further, we had to deal with the legal ramifications. The unit’s ID tag led us to the Vishkar…”

 

“I understand the Vishkar actually disowned it.”

 

“‘The Vishkar Corporation only uses modern maintenance machinery’, that is a direct quote from their statement yes. They did not offer an explanation as to why their non-property from the other side of the country ended up here.”

 

“It’s hardly the first case of a drone acting outside its programmed routine, but rarely have they become celebrities for doing so,” the interviewer laughed as a mosaic of fanart ringed the screen. “But it probably helps to end up as groundskeeper for these legendary gardens. Now Minister, omnic rights activists have seized on this incident to declare that drones and automatons deserve equal consideration in the new constitutions being written in many countries, including Iraq.” Dr. Hassoun’s mirth settled, and he better resembled the man Genji had seen in the operation room. “But they face stiff opposition, even from other--”

 

“Come on, this is a fluff piece,” a human in the other bath declared. “Let’s see the real shit. Put on Miss Platinum!” The stream channel switched.

 

“I don’t think he helped with the procedure,” Genji tutted at Zenyatta. “He was just there to ogle.” His visor simmered.

 

“Russian ground forces report massive casualties in their attempts to free civilians from the captured city of Yekaterinburg, indicating the omnic insurgent forces have deployed several Titan-class representatives as vanguards,” Miss Platinum reported, her silver wig flashing as she glanced at the footage on her right with her crescent of slanted black slots. “Volskaya Industries has pledged its newest mechs will be capable of taking down these massive war machines, but many wonder if it will be too late. The reasons behind the kidnap of the entire Yekaterinburg populace remain unknown.”

 

All the omnics watched when the herald spoke, her face reflecting across theirs. The only exception was Zenyatta, whose towel had slipped low enough to cover his eyes.

 

“By the time we are done here,” an omnic beside Genji grumbled. “They will have an entirely new mess for us to clean up.” Genji scooched away from the spring wall, and reached across a ring of krill drones floating on their backs to adjust Zenyatta’s towel. When he returned to his seat, one of the drones followed him, stationing on the bend of his knees. It took his finger in its tiny manipulators when he poked it. Its tail had a line of white scratches distinguishing it from the others.

 

“ _Oomn!_ ” it squeaked at him. Genji played with its legs, and found Zenyatta meeting his eyes over its spiny back. One of the industrials beside the monk had vacated his seat, and Genji crossed the bath to replace him. Zenyatta tracked his progress, intent always plain in the sharp shifts of his neck. The drone drifted free of Genji, returning to the communal float and swimming circles around the rest.

 

Genji tipped his head to a balance of their temples as pictures of an exploding Russia glimmered over their faces.

 

“We are helping here,” he asserted. “This is what you want.”

 

“I am content here,” Zenyatta affirmed in a voice as gentle and clear as a ritual bell.

 

“Jesse says not to trust the news anyway,” Genji muttered.

 

A shadow parted their reflecting colors. Sri interrupted the holovid with her silhouette. She stood there, talking on her phone, her body profiled in electric yellow light. She stopped speaking only to bite off the head of a roast fish on a stick, then turned away and walked to her tent.

 

Genji leaned to Zenyatta’s ear and whispered. Zenyatta lifted his chin. No one really noticed Genji leaving. They just commented on the hole at Zenyatta’s side later, when he joined the communal bonfire. The beach crew was making leis of roasted vegan marshmallows. Some still had fish tails sticking out of their mouths as they fashioned the brown mallows onto strings. They handed Zenyatta one pre-made, and he waved it off with a chuckle, pointing to the spheres around his head.

 

He watched the fire. His head tilted out to the dark canal between tents where Genji had disappeared.

 

Someone stuffed a broken stick in his hand. She manually wrapped his stiff, surprised fingers around it. There was a marshmallow on the end. Still holding his hand, the woman steered the sugary white puff into the flame. “See, it’s pretty,” she cooed. Zenyatta lifted the marshmallow free, lights fluxing at the fireball in his hand. “But okay, you have to…” she thought aloud, and he looked around the campfire at people blowing out the flames. Zenyatta raised his helpless shoulders. The woman ducked across him and puffed at the marshmallow. Her breath was wet and warm on his hand. “You have to time it right,” she snickered, plucking the marshmallow off the end of his stick and showing the buttery black scars on its skin to him.

 

“What must we time it for?” Zenyatta asked.

 

“To eat.” She popped the marshmallow in her mouth with a wink.

 

Genji turned his lights up as he approached the tent, as he had a quiet footstep. Sri poked the silhouette of her toe into the tent flap to welcome him. Mumbling on the other side indicated she was still on the phone. He unzipped the flap and let himself in. He guessed her caller might be one of the higher-ups from her organization, or a big donor. Her tone curled at the ends of her sentences, appealing to the other speaker. She reclined naked on top of her opened sleeping bag, head propped on purple pillows, free arm extended long and limp across the cushions as Genji knelt in front of her.

 

The neon line of his eyes crawled up her chest. He kissed the hollow of her stomach with his plate. She stayed on the phone, promoting, nodding, business-like. Genji took some of her drying hair in his fist and let it radiate down his fingers, and the word _human_ rolled around his head, increasingly meaningless. Sri laughed at someone’s joke while she cupped the flexile gray plate over his groin. He loosened the matrix of nanites, reconfiguring the stubborn armor to silk. She crooked her finger against the hem and pulled it aside.

 

Phone still plugged to her ear, Sri was over on her elbows and knees. Genji measured the weight of her breasts in his hands and his lips crackled awake behind his mask. Plastic fingertips flowed into the brown of her nipples, arranging around the tips and tugging. She sucked a deep breath, holding it while she listened to the babble from the other end of the line. Genji uncoiled from her and backed up his knees over spandex sloshes of the sleeping bag. He followed one of the veins in her leg with his finger, pulled on the meat of her thighs and watched it snap back. Sri ran every morning, even when the path was icy. She had these wrinkles that looked more like tiger stripes around her knees. He tested them taut. He moved inward, holding up her rump to inquire at the sex beneath.

 

Sri lifted her whole body with an _ooh-uff_ when he butted his pinky finger into the hood hiding her clitoris. The muffle on the phone interrupted its sentence to render a question. Sri dismissed with her answer. Genji snorted. She lowered her hips out of his reach, and clawed at the side of his head with her free hand. He squatted onto his haunches and flattened his hands atop his legs in a polite seiza. Her fingers smeared across his eyes.

 

They could have met each other halfway, in their quavering English, but they preferred the quiet. The only note Genji heard was “good”, spit at him through clenched teeth. Like _good boy,_ or _good dog._ He did not mind being good.

 

The obelisks keened their distant lighthouses over his frame as he walked home. Genji stopped at the water’s edge. Switching to nightvision, he tracked the ink strike of the sakura tree rising from the distant rock. More new leaves in the night, and the buds swollen. He walked toward the gnarled, wind-bitten trunk, legs swinging ripples through the shallows. For a few seconds, he deactivated his temperature moderation.

 

Genji spread his arms out into the wind. The icewater ate his feet. The air stabbed his vents. Tremors bobbled the welcoming gesture of his body. This was his brother’s world.

 

The cyborg streaked through the tent flap, turning a circle and kicking water off his feet in the entryway. None of this activity roused Zenyatta from his examination of a ratty cookbook in front of him. His delicate fingers reclined across the physical pages, tapping at addendums handwritten in the margins. A second and third book floated within the ring of mala around his head, bindings open, pages turning occasionally.

 

Panting, rubbing at his upper arms, Genji circled toward the sleeping bags, only to freeze as a sugary stench populated his sensors. His visor swung around to locate the culprit: a pile of withered and charred marshmallows sitting on an embroidered napkin beside Zenyatta’s crossed legs. He crossed in front of the monk and gathered the smelly black husks. Genji braved the outside world one last time, to dump the confections in a trash bin.

 

When he came back, snowdrops frosting his helmet, he sat cross-legged before Zenyatta. He extended his open palms into the frame of the recipe study. Zenyatta startled. Genji pulsed softly at him, and quirked his head at the photo on the page. It was a Christmas cake, with a halo of strawberries and a sugar santa beetle rearing next to the fudge plaque.

 

He wiggled his fingers at the monk. Zenyatta released the recipe to match silver hands over black ones. His array strobed. He sighed, and patted the side of Genji’s neck. Genji got up and headed for the sleeping bags.

 

“Genji, there is…” Zenyatta started, tipping his head at the empty spot where the marshmallows had been. Genji waited for him to finish, and when nothing else came inserted himself under the flannel. He sniffed at the velvety plaid patterns around his head.

 

After a few minutes, his arm stuck out and noodled the wires at the base of Zenyatta’s spine. “I will join you momentarily,” Zenyatta said, bent over his cookbook again. The electric tent lights went out, leaving a small yellow candle Zenyatta used to read. Genji watched the candlelight twinkle through the gaps in his body.

 

“Thank you for telling me to try talking more with them,” he offered to the steely configuration of nodes and rods. Zenyatta’s head lifted a little from the book. Genji touched his fingers to his palms. He could still feel hair under his fingertips, the twitches of capillaries, the scales of wrinkles. “The world can be beautiful.”

 

“Its beauty or ugliness is not what you should value,” Zenyatta said. “It is the place where we all meet.” Genji lowered his head onto the bag fluff, nodding vaguely. “But that does not discount your opinion.” Zenyatta’s synth warmed, and he looked over his shoulder at the buried man. “In moments, it can be wonderful.”

 

Zenyatta let down his books. He straightened his back. The blue candle smoke hissed around his fingers in the dark. His mala dispensed to a circle on a spare pillow, and he collected his scraps of cream cloth from a peg on the tent pole as he made his way to the sleeping bags. He wrapped the fabric around his shoulders as he climbed into the red bag beside Genji’s.

 

“It is your superhero cape,” Genji said, and stuck out his arms. “Save me, Sentai Ranger…” Zenyatta looked around at Genji’s empty hands, and wormed his way over to interlock their fluffy bags. Their foreheads rested against each other, sharing a pillow roll. Genji wrapped him up, laughing. Zenyatta fluttered, touching his fingers to the front of his tangled cloth. His lights dimmed as Genji’s laughter eased, and they sighed almost in unison. Zenyatta thought that if he wanted to, he could crawl into the other bag and make love.

 

Genji caressed circles around his jaw hinge for several minutes, so Zenyatta knew he could not sleep. “Do you think I should tell him?” Genji asked.

 

“You have already decided,” Zenyatta observed, but he entertained the inquiry, worming his hand out of the fold of their bodies and the bag fabric to wave his fingers upwards. “Would it help him?” His hand lifted. “Would it help you?”

 

“I am trying to decide if I owe him anything.” Genji balanced his fingertips perfectly against Zenyatta’s. His lights cycled a deeper, tangible green. “Or if I withhold, is it because of bitterness? If he died somewhere out there, and I never knew, will it weigh my soul? For most people, dying seems easy.” He retracted his hand in a curl against his chest. “And I would never see him again.”

 

“No matter what you choose, there will be a day when that is the truth of the universe.”

 

Genji turned his face away, feigning ignorance. “Your only doubt is that you will part ways without him ever knowing how you feel,” Zenyatta said, though his synthesizer stuck on the final word and he fell prematurely silent.

 

“What does this life matter so much for, if there’s really an Iris…” Genji mumbled, and Zenyatta flicked his forehead guard. He covered the grievous wound with the warmth of his palm.

 

“We must not let others fall for the sake of our own convenience and fear.” That word always ignited Genji. His spirit burned against Zenyatta. It was destructive, but it was one of those moments in the world that felt wonderful. “The one thing we cannot do is by action or inaction create suffering,” he said as the flame calmed itself. “We must always carefully consider what we choose.” Genji lowered his head. “And use context,” Zenyatta prompted.

 

“Talon showed up in this country again. I wonder if they are looking for him?” Genji thought aloud, and Zenyatta covered him in a proud, soothing blue. Genji ducked his face into the pillow. “I wonder how weak he is without me.”

 

“You see this is a question I cannot answer,” Zenyatta said, and Genji nodded, sinking deeper into his sleeping bag. “Only confrontation.”

 

“Maybe you will come with me, o advocate of adversity,” the voice of Genji muttered from under the bag padding. The white antenna tips still poking from the opening were not very expressive.

 

“I am unable to speak for you, Genji.”

 

“I meant if I mess up somehow. If he tries to kill me again,” Genji clarified, visor popping back out. Zenyatta’s lights darkened in surprise.

 

“My student would not be victorious?” he wondered.

 

“If you put it that way, I cannot fail you,” Genji cheered, his voice deep and warm around Zenyatta. Zenyatta flickered feebly.

 

“When should we…” He stopped speaking.

 

Genji extracted a little more of himself towards that silent, static face.

 

“Genji,” Zenyatta answered, tilting his head. “You are beeping.”

 

“Eh?” But Genji could hear the microwave ping too, radiating from his wrist. _INCOMING MESSAGE_ flashed in overlay across his visual feed, then a video of Winston chewing a banana and sniffing glaze-eyed at the camera popped up.

 

“Is this thing on?”

 

“Ehhh?” Genji quailed. Zenyatta tapped his chest. The prerecorded video cut to another couple attempts by Winston to greet what he called _agents of Overwatch._ Genji shared the feed to Zenyatta just as Winston cleared his throat and continued:

 

“Thirty years ago, the omnics declared war.”

 

Genji sat up on his elbow. Zenyatta rose obligingly beside him. Winston cycled through Overwatch propaganda, and Genji noticed Jesse in one of the shots. Was it before Mr. Reyes had inducted him into Blackwatch? After? He studied the young man’s five o’clock, and looked to his left, at Ana Amari. Everyone was wearing a medal for some reason. McCree covered his with his hat. Mr. Reyes did not look as tired as Genji knew him. It must have been before. “The people decided they were better off without us. They even called us criminals. They tore our family apart,” Winston lamented. His nostrils puffed, and he typed at his computer. “But look around!”

 

New photos, expertly framed by drones or journalists, but not pre-arranged like the Overwatch images. “We have to do something!” Winston pleaded. Genji paused one of the images: children covered the bloody corpse of an omnic with their bodies. Rifles with red accoutrements speared into the scene from the borders of the frame: Talon. One of the children was screaming at the soldiers. Bento boxes lay spilt through the omnic’s butterfly wings of black fluid. “The world needs us now, more than ever.” The message terminated with the coordinates of Watchpoint Gibraltar.

 

Genji and Zenyatta glowed softly together in the dark.

 

“He seems lonely,” Genji hummed. And rounder, bigger. His brow set a more cavernous ledge across his heavy face than Genji remembered.

 

“Will you go to see him?” Zenyatta asked. Genji wrapped his hand under the monk’s jaw.

 

“We don’t have much time till morning,” he said, before retreating to his bag. “Let’s sleep a little while longer.” Zenyatta acquiesced, and they went to bed in a crimson bundle, arms crossed over each other’s sides.

 

Genji roused from an empty, dreamless sleep to find Zenyatta already bright blue beside him. He creaked out of his sleeping bag far enough to kiss the lights, and their radiance tempered to a value more suited to the bare scrape of morning. Genji unzipped the tent flap to collect their clean laundry left in a bag outside. Zenyatta was sitting up when he turned around, his hands spread on the floor of the tent to hold himself, sleeping bag collapsed around his lap.

 

Just as Genji thought to comment on the off-kilter awakening, Zenyatta kicked his legs free of the bag and squirmed over to his cookbooks. He floated, but stretched out like a bony fish, pawing his favorite over before he sat on the air and resumed his reading. Genji snorted and pulled his t-shirt over his head.

 

Dry seaweed flavored the wind as it blew over the rocks in the east, spiced with the almond and vanilla of newborn flowers. Pastel mechs dripped last night’s frost on the beach, two set to idle with barrier shields broadcast from their forearms. Behind the shielding element, a few dedicated humans and omnics gathered to watch Master and student over the blinding odor of instant coffee. The ground black beans mucked Genji’s sensors. When he flipped and dashed he was escaping the odor as much as Zenyatta’s jabs and feints. But perhaps the reason they had stayed with Sri’s crew for so long was not so meaningful as doing the right thing or saving the world. Maybe they just had a common love of sunrises.

 

Zenyatta’s foot peaked into the air, leg twisting in the breeze. Genji tracked the flight too closely. A sandal heel crashed into his forehead, knocking him to his knees in the sand. Zenyatta tightened his hands to fists, and one of his mala cracked open, bleeding violet. He gifted the chaotic light to Genji, and the world faded. The beach became the shifting snake white of powdered bone under his hand, the ocean a gray indifference. All he could smell was blood and oil. His wakizashi came out before there was even an attack to deflect. Zenyatta floated in pale silver before him, one leg straight and the other foot resting to its side, the bare separation of his toe and the sand rendering him taller than Genji.

 

“You can handle this, my brave student,” Zenyatta encouraged him.

 

“I will destroy you,” Genji swore, thrashing his head as if he could parry away the orb laying roots through his medulla. Zenyatta arranged his hands in flat shields, one resting beside his chassis, the other forward at Genji, fingertips bent up in a slippery curve. His blue array, the only color left in the universe, saturated darkly at Genji.

 

“It is better that you do so with more than your words,” he replied. “It seems that your attempts so far have not been in earnest--”

 

Genji slashed into the sentiment, his shadow made of neon and left behind. Zenyatta caught the scrape of the sword on the back of his wrist. Genji knocked the heavy band of his forehead into Zenyatta’s plate, shoving his head back. Genji laughed as he slid back, only to find his sword no longer in his hand.

 

Zenyatta twirled the stolen wakizashi out to his side as he lifted his head level, the scuff across his lights resolving in a twinkle of reconstituting shield nanites. “How do you see more by envisioning the world only in black and white?” he asked, and the sword passed from his hand, to one made of light, and back to Genji handle-first. Genji glanced at their crowd, but none of the drowsy morning faces looked any more enlightened for the appearance of divine interference.

 

Low throbs, like hearts beating free in the air, alerted him to Zenyatta flashing his hands over his face in a cross of silver fans. Distortions of omnic energy coalesced over the monk’s shoulders, reflections of his blue eyelights coating each wobbly surface. Genji could always count to three, the number of glossy bulbs Zenyatta would summon before launching at him. He sank his leg out long across the sand for balance and swiped the flat of the wakizashi forward.

 

The orbs did not lift from their stasis. Zenyatta’s arms shook. A fourth orb appeared, the North Star shining over his bald head.

 

Genji rose from his crouch, halfway into an evasive leap when Zenyatta launched and two of the orbs slammed into his chest. The other pair struck his sword like diamond hammers, quaking his whole arm. One ricocheted into the sand near the roots of the mech barriers, and the onlookers squealed delight. As Genji got up, crumbles of chrome fell from his breastplate. Zenyatta was also floating back to recovery-- the final reflected orb had domed his lights.

 

He noticed Sri jogging the seaside in the distance, tipped off not by her appearance but the familiar motion of her hand toward the phone in the pocket of her cottony jacket. When the flash of her eyes turned to him, he charged Zenyatta.

 

“You’re really into this today,” he wheezed gleefully as he put another lash into the monk’s shoulder, hiking his knee to meet the defending kick. “But it will not save you, Master.”

 

“I believe in you, my Genji,” Zenyatta responded as they turned together, wind flagging their shirts around the hard stalks of their bodies, new wounds across that stupid frog face screaming for stitches. Someone shouted at Zenyatta, claiming he was due at the camp’s impromptu kitchen for breakfast duty. Genji’s visor cut to a low, dark glimmer as they bent around each other like a circle of serpents. “You do not attack in anger,” Zenyatta surmised. His lights stuttered pale. “Though you do enjoy it.”

 

“Let’s go!” Genji snarled, sheathing the wakizashi and nocking a couple shuriken between his fingers. His next punch would have a finalizing bite.

 

Zenyatta’s focus left the fight. He went very still, staring at an angle into the sky. His discord left Genji’s neck. Genji’s blades stopped at his cheek. “What is it?” he asked, relaxing from his stance. The globe of the sun swept onto the ocean behind Zenyatta. Zenyatta lingered in a standing drift before him. “Zenyatta,” he called, to no response. The whites of staring eyes behind the mech shields started to expand in question. Even the mala were not moving.

 

Genji scrutinized the plate around Zenyatta’s array: chipped, but not dented or oozing black. He cupped the monk’s shoulder, flexing his other hand around the back of his head. “Do you feel--”

 

The salt and fish and vanilla of the winter beach disappeared. A cactus flower opened beneath Genji’s nose, ripe and yellow and surrounded by spears. The wind dropped away, and the sky fell onto his armor, pressuring from all sides like he stood far beneath the surface of the water. Honey flooded his wires, gold lit the air, and his body stretched, a can full of blooming and withering sakura.

 

With a brittle bone crack the wounds in his breastplate set, and Genji looked down. Translucent yellow arms shot through his shoulder, heart, and stomach. The hands surrounding him hooked fingers against heaven, palms raised as though to hold back time. Beach crewmen shouted behind Zenyatta like tinny foghorns. The slick of frost fell from the mechs in melted curtains, and the drones cracked out of the units’ shoulders, eyes red. A shadow ringed in gold submerged Zenyatta’s body, t-shirt dyed to wraith scraps dangling off his skeleton. The nine lights on his face spasmed on and off.

 

The spider of extraneous arms quaked in a distorted wave from the upper to lowermost pair. Genji pulled the dark body to his own and sought across the beach for the danger. Something Zenyatta must have seen before he did. The atmosphere around the monk pulled his heels from the sand. Beyond the mech line, yellow dot lights sprinkled awake in the water. They were all Zenyatta’s eyes. Several of the omnics huddled beneath the mechs scrambled up and ran away down the beach. Humans scattered after them. One crewman backed up so fast he tripped and spilled his coffee on his face, voice twisting up in a high-pitched bark. The burns vanished as they manifested. For a moment, a shadow of golden arms fainter than Zenyatta’s own appeared behind him, and those hands were steady, splitting from their constant mudras to caress the monk’s shadow.

 

“ _No!_ ” Zenyatta cried in Genji’s embrace.

 

Pairs of ephemeral arms dyed violet from fingers to fading shoulders and dropped away. _m.o.n_ disappeared from the Net. The lights on Zenyatta’s forehead clicked off. Genji reached through the veil for his hollow eyes.

 

He was standing in the restaurant’s court of tomato, bread, and cinnamon, and Dayahang was staring at him because he was not moving at all.

 

She had fallen from the ladder she was using to access the shrine lamps, and her oiled stick burned against her forehead as she lay among the flower petals, a vein of fire tracking down into her eyes.

 

A new adherent clutched his arm, jostling him from his pose, his limbs falling limp and unfocused to the blankets. The other omnic called a name over and over again. It had no meaning to him. He had only one name.

 

He was a lotus in a cave of crystal blue ice. Seeking answers on a more secluded mountain, but finding only that he froze, inanimate as the knives jutting from the snow around his crossed legs. His only companion was a pile of bones and ragged yellow cloth half-embedded in the ice. He had never told anyone about the corpse, or even that he snuck out here, but they all saw now.

 

She collapsed on the pulpit and the groom lifted her face from the wood with the ease of his iron arms. The bride held her waist with tender brown hands to keep her from falling to the floor. Red bangles rattled in harmonious lines back and forth along the human’s wrists. The couple’s grass braids hung across her head as they bent over her, and the plants were so newly cut they still bled clear, pungent sap.

 

A hand twitched, knotted into a fist.

 

The wind parted clothing, stirred the band of vulture feathers tied to his shoulder strut.

 

Every snowflake an avalanche.

 

Genji snared himself from the cycling perspectives just before his legs lost balance. But voices rose in distant processors, screaming so loud the world dimmed. The dizzying ring grew stronger on every loop. He clamped his hands onto the sides of his head, and Zenyatta dropped to the dirt in front of him, body black as the void, laced in dawn light. His lights came around in gold, flickering unsteadily.

 

“Master, make them stop!” His own voice was garbled static in his ears. Zenyatta rose out of the dirt, crossing his legs like a reflex, floating low. His head swiveled around at the world. Ripples of gold passed down his body, briefly drowning his eyelights. “Zenyatta,” Genji retched out. The black head turned to him. “Please…” Genji went blind as the network claimed his visual processing, and his fingers numbed to nothingness.

 

“Genji.” The name crawled from the pit, so slow it sounded like two separate words expressed in many tones at once. _Gen-ji._

 

The wailing of the Shambali crackled into silence.

 

Only one was left broadcasting, ripped open, unable to stop, pulling the rest.

 

Genji could handle just one.

 

* * *

 

Yellow streetlights winked off the cobbles beneath her bony hand. Her fingers stretched, nudging into the insect eyes of rainwater splashed over each individual stone. She could feel the wintry flood up and down the plaza seeping up her robe. She could smell it: enough oily water to drown in, mixed with the floating skin cells of humans. Drone helicopters rang steady buzzing flaps down the alleyways, all their motors collected into sync.

 

She focused on her hand, turning it over, flexing it open and closed, surprised even as she stood that she was still alive. The yellow eyes of the Iris watched her from flags posted around the stage. Her counterpart, the adherent who had seen Mondatta off to his speech, leaned on the podium, staring out at the car.

 

The crowd flowed backward, ushered away by an ever-expanding ring of useless bodyguards. Lumanti pushed between them. They were screaming. She was silent. When she reached the line of black-and-white men flapping their arms, one thrust his palm in her face. Lumanti clutched his much taller shoulder and _adjusted_ his position, leaving him stumbling behind her. _I apologize ma’am, I didn’t realize it was you._

 

She walked toward the legs hanging out of the side of the limousine. His ankle must have nicked the bed of the car when he fell: one of his sandals hung loose, red tie spilled on the pavement among chunks of silver. One of the bodyguards hunched at the open door, holding the frame and hissing into his head mic. When she neared, he snapped his fingers to get the attention of the others, and pointed at her.

 

Muscular wrists hooked under her armpits, collecting her nearly off her feet. “Please don’t,” a guttural voice slid into her ear when she leveraged her pistons to break free. Lumanti recognized the man, the second under the security chief. She went still and he set her against the limousine trunk, swallowing her up in his black cloth. “The scene is not clear yet. We’re getting another car,” he said as he pricked her chest through her robes. He felt the side panels of her skull, and clamped onto the wiring at the back of her neck, her feet hiking onto their toes. “I’m sorry, Lu.”

 

He helped her turn around, still in the confines of his silhouette. Her fingers dug against the angles and crevices of the bulletproof vest beneath his blazer. “Are you alright? Your primaries are overheated.” She looked up his chest at his face, unable to speak. His eyes stilled behind his hologlasses as he listened to a transmission on his headset. Lumanti twisted left, peeking over his arm, but she could not see through the limo’s tinted rear window. A sonic boom flicked over their amalgamated cloth, metal, and skin like a fresh coat of rain, and she jumped. “Hold on…” the bodyguard said, and they both looked up to the glossy red nebula sparking out of the night sky. Lumanti’s face trained after the light, the whine of engines dissipating in the fog.

 

_karroten: You cannot show this to our brothers and sisters._

_Genji!_ she cried in surprise. His voice was heavy enough to circle her in his arms.

 

The bodyguard adjusted the fit of her clothing around her shoulders and stepped back, and her eyes were on those hanging feet again, unmoved from when she last saw them.

 

_karroten: Turn it off._

Lumanti took her first step. The bodyguard held her arm to keep her on her feet. _This is…_ she thought, her fingers knifing into the guard’s wrist as mist rolled across the cobblestones, obscuring the glitter on the ground. _…all that I am..._

 

_karroten: I will stay with you. But you must not take the rest. I know the face of death._

She obeyed him, placing each piece of herself back in her own body, streamed only to his waiting hand. Her lights grayed briefly.

 

_Loch4n4: As do we, Brother._

Lumanti turned around the doorframe to Mondatta.

 

She pulled her fists up to her jaw, ground her featureless silver lip into her fingers, back rigid. Mondatta’s hand was freezing, dyed by the London winter when she took it. His fingers moved loosely at the slightest pressure of hers. She sat down at his side.

 

Police hovercraft cleared the remainder of the audience in their jet-powered landings around the plaza. Cycles of blue and red light drowned out the speech’s homely theater. Lumanti sat straight when she heard a human whoop rise from the darkness. She looked at the protestors cordoned at the end of the street. They waved their arms, cheering. The bodyguards parted to let an engineer through. He bent over and toiled at the head of the body next to her.

 

_karroten: Wait._

 

He said it as she was turning back to Mondatta. He sent her a refocused image from her own visual feed: a woman with a light glowing in her chest that dropped from a fire escape. Lumanti searched the empty plaza, and discovered her speaking with one of the bodyguards and rubbing at her upper arm.

 

_karroten: It is Lena. You must speak to her. You could find out why._

Lumanti watched the woman pull her goggles off to wipe the tears from her eyes.

 

She bent back over Mondatta.

 

_Loch4n4: I know why._

She closed the connection.

 

* * *

 

Sri bent over him, her hair hanging a dark wreath around his face. Beyond her lay the long gray sky. She jostled his shoulder again, and Genji shook his head, waving his hand in a dismissing slash across his face. He became aware of several things at once: Zenyatta’s hand spread over his head, the emptiness of the beach, and the _tap_ s and _ping_ s of fingers on phones in the distance. He twisted under Sri and Zenyatta’s hands, putting his elbows on the sand and glancing down the shoreline. The rest of the beach crew were gathered there. The Hokkaido students had their phones out to take video and pictures.

 

Zenyatta stroked one of his antennae from base to tip. Genji’s visor flashed up. Zenyatta floated in his customary seat just off the ground, the hand over Genji unsteady as his arm shuddered, eyelights more milk than blue. He lacked any other illumination, and the Lúcio shirt dangled off him in shreds.

 

“You did well,” he told Genji in as small a voice as Genji had ever heard from him. Genji lurched onto his knees and swiped Zenyatta into his arms. The monk’s body slackened in his arms, losing some of its flight, like the embrace was permission. His mala were scattered all around them in the sand, every sphere cracked open and emptied.

 

Sri’s jacket sleeve whispered across the rings and blades coating Genji’s back. His head turned sharply.

 

“You have to tell me what happened.” She was looking at Zenyatta. “It’s possible we woke something in the sea.” All the lights stirring in the water were gone now. “A god program,” she insisted, voice dropping. “Do you know if it took him?” she asked.

 

Genji blinked at her. He returned to the omnic collapsed in his arms.

 

“Time to go home,” he told Zenyatta in Nepali. Zenyatta shivered.

 

“Genji.” Sri grit her teeth.

 

Genji held the back of Zenyatta’s neck as he considered the issue.

 

“I will call Winston,” he decided, and reached down the encrypted channel to relay their coordinates. Zenyatta showed his first sign of life since Genji took hold of him, head shifting against Genji’s cheek.

 

“Do you wish to take action on the world?” he asked, lifting an arm around Genji’s back and hauling himself straight.

 

“Winston will have a ship we can use,” Genji explained. Zenyatta did not answer, but his lights regained a little more color. Loosening his hold to one arm, Genji bowed aside to Sri’s tightened expression. “May I ask you a favor?” he inquired in English. Her eyes widened, the wrinkling around the sockets tested. “Make a convincing excuse for us.” Sri’s irises lit with touches of moisture.

 

“You cannot explain this to me?” she demanded, shaking her head.

 

“I trust you will do the right thing, because you are a ‘stranger who cares’.” Genji watched her expression harden, like an omnic, to cold steel. She slammed her fist into his bicep.

 

“I am not a stranger, idiot,” she growled as she got to her feet and dusted the sand from her knees. She left them and went to the line of crew workers, shouting at the students among them.

 

He was a good idiot.

 

That seemed fair.

 

“Can you get up?” he whispered to Zenyatta, and with his arms as handholds the monk rose to a better drifting height. Genji let go of him and went to collect the spheres, but the first one he approached stirred like an egg and wrenched its pieces closed. Genji needed only give it a push back in Zenyatta’s direction. The rest gathered after. Shouts from the beach crew pursued their departure, but no bodies. He enveloped Zenyatta’s cold hand in his own. His feet moved silently across the treeline, never cracking the crust of snow.

 

He led Zenyatta to the grotto where they had conducted their less active meditations. Dots of ruby watched them from the branches as they waited for-- Genji was not sure what. Zenyatta’s hands hung limp against his knees. They were far enough from the beach that Genji could no longer hear the surf.

 

“I cannot go with you,” Zenyatta said. Genji lifted himself from the silent visual refuge of the snow past his knees. He tilted his head, replayed the crisp audio, and still he did not believe it.

 

“What?” Zenyatta only watched him, expressionless. An electrical current wound inside Genji’s stomach, frigid and deep. “Do you understand--”

 

“Mondatta is dead.”

 

“Then, we must go,” Genji instructed, gravel in his synth.

 

“I will not. I cannot give them what they want.” Zenyatta’s lights were steady ice blue.

 

“You cannot be--” Despite the absurdity of the gesture in this body, Genji felt a cough scratching up his throat. “You cannot be selfish in this. Don’t you need to say goodbye too?”

 

“It is only a body.”

 

“ _Zenyatta,_ ” Genji swore, volume rising. He shook his head, cut his ardor. “I understand you are upset, but this is not about your feelings or your disagreements. Your brother has fallen.”

 

“My concern must lie with those that remain.” It was Mondatta’s tone in his voice, disconnected from his expression of dimly fluttering lights. His voice was unwavering.

 

“Master.” Genji glared at him. “You know they would never demand anything. They understand you.” What was this feeling?

 

“Even you do not understand, my pupil.”

 

Genji stiffened.

 

He was perched on a cliff, a waterfall and a traitor beneath his feet. Hanzo was collapsed in prayer to a dead river. McCree was telling him _Hanzo was so strange today,_ and in how many ways his behavior differed from expectation. And it grew worse through the seasons, as the cherry blossoms grew out and flowered. _Do you think I should tell him?_ Because Genji always knew where and when he would find Hanzo. He knew what his brother did every year.

 

“You are…” Genji struggled to expel the unfamiliar word. “Disrespectful.” Zenyatta had no answer.

 

A blimp shadow with fat wings descended to the snowpack, very like the silhouette of a bomb-puller fluttering over the water. Blue hoverjets stretched legs of translucent fire beneath the white metal whale. Doors slid open on the side, and a ramp dropped. A faded Overwatch logo painted the tail. Genji got up and set a foot on the ramp’s bottommost tile.

 

He looked back at Zenyatta. “I can’t very well leave you here,” he said, and Zenyatta rose from the snow to follow him inside. Winston was not onboard. The pilot box was empty. Genji strapped Zenyatta into one of the passenger wells and sat down beside him, crossing his arms. He ground his heel in the reupholstered grate floor as the shuttle breezed out of the forest, ascending rapidly to low orbit, where even Genji floated a little.

 

A smooth, confident voice washed onto them from the intercom:

 

“Welcome. I am Athena. Genji, if you need…” A storage compartment whished open at the back of the ship. Inside hung a line of bomber jackets, Overwatch gray and orange, a decade old and in flawless condition. Genji looked down at his own shirt, and the rags laced over Zenyatta. Zenyatta lay against the sidewall of the passenger well, his head propped on the steel.

 

Genji yanked off his t-shirt, dropping it on the floor. Walking to the closet, he collected one of the soft, puffy jackets.

 

He undid the strap hitch over Zenyatta and dragged the monk into his lap. He wrapped the jacket around his shoulders, followed by his arms.

 

When Zenyatta shuddered, the coordination of all the invisible gears needed was audible, whirring sickly against Genji’s chest. Sometimes the motion went on longer, held Zenyatta like it was trying to jostle apart his pieces. Genji ducked his face against the monk's.

 

“Why would you not let those who love you heal you? It is alright to let someone else do it,” he whispered. “Ask me what being prideful about your heritage has ever done for anyone.” Zenyatta did not say anything. It was a long flight, longer than an hour. Zenyatta tried to make a mudra over his knee with a shaking hand. Genji held the mouth of his mask and squeezed the omnic’s quivering body.

 

Eventually he glanced up at the pilot box, wisps of cloud streaming past the unnecessary bay windows. “You are like Kuebiko?” he ventured.

 

“Thoth, Kuebiko, these were previous iterations before Winston found me,” the voice answered. Her Japanese was very capable. “Nice to meet you,” she offered.

 

“Nice to meet you,” Genji mumbled.

 

Winston waited for them at a large circular landing pad at Watchpoint Gibraltar. The shuttle had to land carefully between piles of boxes and lines of hazard tape. Winston limped over to the deploying ramp, hobbled beneath his white body armor, a winged jetpack flung over his shoulders. A few dots of red glittered among the boxes where he had been standing, and stains ringed the low edges of his nostrils. Genji walked out ahead of Zenyatta, visor lifting at the blast marks ringing the Watchpoint’s front doors.

 

“Genji! It’s good to see you!” Winston exclaimed, pushing the back of his paw across his nose. Genji twisted to Zenyatta and placed a hand between his shoulders, nudging the monk forward to Winston’s side. “Uh…” Zenyatta remained still, floated into place like a buoy.

 

“I need your ship.” Genji turned back around. “I am going to help my family.”

 

“Oh.” Winston was still blinking at Zenyatta, but as Genji’s metal feet rang up the ramp, he straightened to attention. “Of course! Athena can take you anywhere!” he exclaimed proudly. His shoulders sank toward Zenyatta again. “Your friend…” Genji paused at the apex of the ramp, glancing down at the monk.

 

“That is Zenyatta,” he said. “He can take care of himself. Just make sure he does not wander off.”

 

“Hello, then, Zenyatta,” Winston tried, brow contorting at the silent monk.

 

“Genji,” Athena wondered from one of the shuttle’s outer speakers. “That name-- is this one of the Shambali?”

 

Zenyatta showed no sign of moving back to the ramp.

 

“Not really,” Genji answered, and ducked into the ship.

 

The starlight of the shuttle engine faded across the sky. Zenyatta glanced at the impressions of blood and electrical fire on Winston’s uniform. He raised his hand, and a ball of golden light gathered above the scientist’s fuzzy head.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter** : No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.
>   * _Jakarta_ \- capital of Indonesia
>   * _coelacanth_ \- a famous "living fossil" fish initially thought to have gone extinct around the same time as the dinosaurs, but was rediscovered living in the oceans between Africa and Indonesia. In 2013, the sequenced genome of the coelacanth indicated that it is still evolving, and that its image as an animal unchanged from ancient times is inaccurate.
>   * The Japanese archipelago consists of five major islands. Furthest north is Hokkaido, where the city of Sapporo and Hokkaido University are located. The largest island that contains Tokyo, Mt. Fuji, etc. is called Honshu. Shikoku and Kyushu are below that, and the farthest south and west island is Okinawa.
>   * _Sapporo_ \- the largest city on Hokkaido Island and capital of the prefecture
>   * _banzai_ \- a Japanese gesture involving a cheer ("banzai!") and the lifting of the arms as a way of expressing enthusiasm or victory, lit. "ten thousand years!"
>   * _seiza_ \- a traditional Japanese sitting posture, kneeling with buttocks balanced on heels, and hands in the lap or on the thighs. In the simplest terms it is a gesture of respect and dedication, and is used in martial arts, tea ceremonies, etc.
>   * _Christmas cake_ \- a popular Japanese tradition that originated as an emulation of Americans after WWII. It is typically a white cream cake with strawberries and a chocolate message plaque. Christmas as a holiday is not taken very seriously in Japan, but you will see plenty of santa hats and Rudolph noses. Hanzo is seen buying a chocolate variation of the Christmas cake in the 2016 Reflections comic. There is a little boy standing next to him that he is showing the cake off to, and I hope they update that story in this year's comic so that we know where that boy came from. Christmas cakes are typically shared with family...
>   * _Athena_ \- in Greek mythology, the goddess of wisdom and war
>   * _Iris_ \- in Greek mythology, the messenger of the divine and goddess of the rainbow. She was married to one of the Anemoi (gods of the wind). Iris traveled to all worlds to deliver messages and answer prayers, including the mortal plane and the underworld. One of her most popular depictions in classical art shows her descending into the dreamworld to wake the sleeping god of dreams, Morpheus.
>   * I think last year I wished for a Blackwatch McCree skin for Christmas, which we ended up getting in the Uprising event. So this year mmmm how about the ancient Genji from Dragons/the 2017 Halloween tapestry for the Lunar New Year event?
>   * Oh yeah HAPPY HOLIDAYS here's your dead robo...sorry. :(
> 



	20. Lost Boys

 

“The Nepali government has erected a no-fly zone above the monastery,” Athena reported. Her pitch fluttered upwards, playful, “It can be evaded.”

 

“There is no need.” Genji leaned over the dash to look out the pilot’s window. “Drop me off in the valley.” The shuttle cleared the barrier mountains and sank below the frozen cotton of the clouds. Genji pointed at the white dragon cutting through the foothills. “There. That river.”

 

He hung in the exit arch and jumped out as soon as the ramp dropped, black tabi gripping the snow. “Does Winston need the ship back?” Silence from Athena. Genji circled around to the shuttle’s droopy nose. The engines in her wings and tail grumbled off. She floated on the egg blue hum of her hoverjets, tracks of steam puffing off her flanks. “Who has responded to his message?” Genji queried the pilot box.

 

“Lena Oxton of course,” Athena thundered through the outer speakers. “And you. No one else, just yet.” Genji folded his arms over his chest. The speakers clicked and popped for several seconds. “Even in our most optimistic predictions, Winston and I did not expect a massive initial response,” the A.I. tutted him. “Agents are agents no matter where they are. The world needs saving, so they are busy. I can wait for you here.”

 

The implacable reflection of Genji Shimada stood aglare on the honey glass of the pilot window. He craned his head at the mountain waiting behind him, wet blue stone bubbled and streaked by decaying snowfalls.

 

He bowed to the shuttle, and turned home.

 

“Perhaps when you return, I will have some good news,” Athena wished for him as he headed up the river.

 

* * *

 

Water sucked and slapped at the ice. There was no sky. Clouds mummified the river, lumping upon each other in tigers of heavenly indigestion. Strings of fog played the silent bones of tornados, waxing along the water. His silhouette was dust on the snow, and the mountain a monument to his imagined handprints clawing the crags and empty vulture nests. Over the next ridge he spotted the broken-down earthquake house, its walls flooded black. Genji walked around the creaking stack of wood and water.

 

He stopped, his mind full of owls and spiders.

 

The world crossed into another morning. Or maybe this was the same sun he had seen in Japan, arriving later here under the clouds. Genji dropped his eyes to a spot of color by his foot: a mushroom poking its wormy umbrella from the snow. Footprints met him from the other direction, bars of sandals, Mondatta’s ghost. The depression of a fallen leg in a skirt.

 

The wet ebony roots of blood sinking in the frost.

 

He turned around, following the scrapes in the snow, impressed by the inevitability of his life. The footprints dashed through the hole in the house where the door had been. Water keyed from the doorframe, freezing as it fell, birthing webs of ice across the gap. The roof groaned as his silent feet graced the doorstep. His reflection spiraled in the doorway, one arm too big, chest concaved to a twig, half his visor swollen into a single goopy eye, legs amputated by the icy gristle on the mirror.

 

Genji flattened his hand to the frozen barrier. Water licked his palm. Lightning white flaws radiated from his contact point. He lifted all but two fingers from the ice, and spun those two around each other, gliding across the film.

 

When he exhaled, wooly earmuffs clapped to his head and he was laughing, rosy-cheeked, at Hanzo. Hanzo assembled himself from his fallen outline on the river glass. Leafless black cherry trees struck out of the ground behind him. Hanzo beckoned with his mittens. Grinning, Genji teetered a step onto the ice, and promptly fell on his butt.

 

He punched through his reflection, and a flimsy howl escaped the house wreckage ahead. Genji picked the crystallized guts of the doorway from his path. The voice beyond whimpered into silence, the last bleats of the wounded homestead, its innards vibrating around his intrusion. He aimed a neon accusation at the rafters: empty, beams bowing like harps. The ants had moved on, but fungi still polluted the angles of the ceiling, peach bulbs popping out of the wood.

 

Genji stepped under the buckled hole at the center of the roof. Snowflakes whirled around his visor. Directly ahead in the watery darkness, wheezes scrambled out of a synthesizer. Blue light peeked between broken beams, outlining an upright coffin that had once been a closet or pantry. Genji tuned his own glow to flashbulb intensity, squid-like, simultaneous communique and examination. The green cast was tricky, coloring every shiny surface in Mondatta’s porcelain tint. Cracked, skinny leg struts scrabbled at the floor, backing the lost soul further into his corner, chunks of ragged silk catching to the wood and peeling from his hull.

 

A single blue eyelight denoted the Shambali’s forehead.

 

“Chakor.” Genji called his brother’s name, and Chakor flinched from his huddle. His face bobbed out from behind the shattered wall, and his lonely light flushed brighter.

 

“Genji,” he gurgled, as if he had forgotten how to turn electricity to speech, as if Genji was a distant stranger. But he reached out with both hands. Genji broke apart the rickety wall and tucked to his knees beside Chakor, and they gathered each other in their arms. “Brother!” Chakor cried, voice thickening, his chin listing against Genji’s arm. Oil slathered Genji’s fingers as his hands dipped lower.

 

“Did you hurt your leg?” he asked, nudging Chakor back and looking down the space between them. “Let me see.” He framed his hands around the large splits in the right leg. Chakor was cold under his palms. He would have expected it of any other metal abandoned in the snow, but he kept thinking of Mondatta’s hand, frigid on the bed of his limo. “Are you bleeding?” Chakor’s head pinched after the movements of Genji’s investigation in chickadee swift panic. Genji showed him the black drops on his fingers. “Is it still coming out?”

 

“I closed the valves,” Chakor mumbled. Genji’s chest relieved with a chuckle. He slapped a hand over the monk’s head and ruffled his bald spot. Chakor stilled, synth dwindling to regular gasps. Some deep-set programming instructed his motionless chest to imitate the rattle of pain, always trying to trigger human compassion.

 

Static zipped up Genji’s arm as he cupped the wound again. Zenyatta said that repairing people was looking without flinching. Honest eyes would see more than a broken body.

 

His fingers slithered against the cracks.

 

What was physical was only flotsam upon the water.

 

Genji unfurled worms of energy from his back, green will-o’-wisps looping in and out of view over his shoulder. He could imagine how it would happen: wounds dissipating, exchanged for the unfailing aquatic pearl of dragon scales.

 

Concentrating, he pulled away, neon cursives draining between his fingertips and Chakor.

 

The injuries remained. Genji stared at the wet canyons in Chakor’s leg. _Not good enough._ The voice sounded like Hanzo. The brother who never laughed at his failings, only criticized. Genji lounged his weight back on his haunches, analyzing his complete lack of effect. It did not bother him as much as the Hanzo in his mind wanted it to.

 

Even Zenyatta did not use only his hands.

 

Chakor gawped at him.

 

“Did you fall?” Genji asked. He brushed the chrome point of his brow. “When we were all hurting.”

 

Chakor lowered his head. His slots dragged like Zenyatta’s, but with more bow to them, so he always looked sleepy instead of melancholy. The deep bar of his chin hooked like a beard point. Stripe vents along the backside of his head bared black flicks of his inner skull, accessorized hints of Mondatta. Once upon a time, his robes had been the same yellow as a bright, new chick.

 

“I am shameful,” Chakor declared in his cool, gentle voice. He laid his hands over his legs, fingertips shimmering past the oily welts. “Master would be disappointed in me.” Genji realized Chakor’s alias was disabled on his contact list. Not magicked away, like _m.o.n_ , but marked as unable to receive messages. He was not the only one. Four Shambali read _[OFFLINE]._

 

Genji understood.

 

The house fell.

 

Sawdust vomited across his body from the pursing midlines of the walls, then shingles and spongy rafters drowned him in a single massive eruption. Genji’s face smashed into the mildew flooring.

 

The world rustled around the mangled wooden ribcage of the earthquake house, leering in the holes. Genji could hear the viscous, bitter fog prowling toward them across the ice. Mud obfuscated his visor, but he could not lift his arms to scrape it free. Blankets of snow sank through the crippled roof and swamped his defenseless corpse. Chakor stirred with a moan, fingers spidering helplessly under their rotten cocoon. Genji detected the awkward clacks of a broken leg trying to stand.

 

“Don’t,” he ordered. “Use your upper body, and push with me.” He jammed his elbows and shoulders into the formless clog of the roof. He could not lift far on his own, but Chakor joined him, and the black cloak parted. Their bodies poked out, swarmed in melty oaken slime and chunks of slate. Genji sniffed around at the gray fields sweating the river. Chakor dropped his head back on the fallen wall.

 

“It was like this when I was born,” the omnic coughed, his indicator bleaching. “Everything was broken, and I could not move.” He used his thumbs to carve streaks in the dreck over Genji’s eyes. “Master saved me. He saved me. He almost died to save me…” Chakor kept grinding at the muddied visor, spreading the dirt caught on his fingertips anew.

 

“Do you know where you are?” Genji prompted, and Chakor’s hands slid away.

 

“I am with you,” he said after a moment. “Brother Genji. And…” He raised a limp finger into the air. “I can feel the wind.” Flecks of wood flew off his fingertip.

 

“It picked up,” Genji agreed. “I guess this was a bad place to talk. We blew the house down!” He sat up, detritus fanning apart from his back in moist brown wings. He collected mushy wooden slats off Chakor’s legs. Chakor taxed shavings and soil from his helmet. The air had a sting of wet hay to it. “You are brave,” Genji huffed as they attempted standing together. “When I ran away, I waited until the sun came out, and all the ice had melted.” Most of Chakor’s bodyweight thrust over his hip and shoulder, but the monk could hop and pivot with his left leg.

 

Chakor swayed against him, wind-torn, a flagpole for the remains of his clothing.

 

“I thought I could reach her,” he groaned.

 

“Her?” Genji scavenged the carcass of Chakor’s sleeve, sifting the remaining threads away from his shoulder. He hunched over and tied the fabric around Chakor’s right thigh, binding the remaining plate, crisscrossing Chakor’s leg in daring sunflower.

 

“Lumanti confessed Master’s killer to me,” Chakor wheezed. He was looking far away from Genji and the river, across the amorphous join of snow and fog. “It was a woman from Talon.” A dart palped through Genji’s heart.

 

“Your intentions do not sound very peaceful,” he soothed. Chakor reached behind his back and gripped the katana scabbard, shaking it in his fist.

 

“You have always thought peaceful coexistence was a mistake, have you not, Brother? You and Master Zenyatta.” Chakor was watching him now with those sleeping eyes. “Master is no longer here to tell me how to bear it. The humans are murderers.”

 

“You are not wrong,” Genji cooed, and Chakor started in his arms. “I am human,” Genji reminded him.

 

“You are not.” The Shambali’s voice shrank. His hand dug past the sword, into Genji’s back. “You are not! Maybe you were born that way…” He faltered, and the cast of Genji’s visor profiled him as he stared to his bloody sandals. “But you are not human anymore.”

 

“Am I better now?” Genji inquired with a dry laugh. Chakor wilted. “I imagine your sewing teacher misses you already.” Flower hunter, village seamstress, Dayahang’s mother, the other lone eye to whom Chakor had fixed himself through all of Genji’s time among the Shambali. “Is your revenge worth her tears?”

 

Chakor withdrew. Genji had to catch his arm to keep him from slipping off his shattered leg. Stained hands fanned against his breastplate, hardening to fists.

 

“Why would you speak of her?” Chakor’s voice jolted out of him, a vibration cracking the winter silence. “We were just beginning to understand each other!” His blue signal light sheered a laser into the clouded air. “Master said she went with the Iris, but why would she leave me?!”

 

Genji’s visor light softened. The woman had been old.

 

“Death does not answer requests. It is more powerful than any one person.” He raised his hand to his heart. “When I was mortally wounded and wanted to die, I lived anyway.” Chakor’s head startled up at him. “Surely she wanted to stay with you, but humans never live as long as machines. Only the soul is forever.” Genji held the monk’s cheek. “Don’t you take hers with you, wherever you go?” Chakor examined the touch, but pulled his face from it.

 

“Master was not old,” came his protest. “Not as old as my dear friend Timila, or her baby Dayahang. Not as old as you, right Genji?”

 

“Not as old as me,” Genji agreed in a razor-thin rasp of his synth. “But so much wiser, Brother. I wonder, maybe he taught you to fight?” He held up his white-and-black knuckles. “That is how you will pursue Talon?” he suggested. Chakor’s signal light nearly vanished in the mist.

 

“I heard him talking about omnics in the north before he left,” Chakor squeaked. His conviction hid in a whisper, “He said they were very strong.”

 

“Is that all he said about them?” Genji probed. Chakor picked at the vents along his ribs, seeking the truth of the black frame beneath.

 

“I am shameful,” he repeated. “I ran from the pain of my brothers and sisters. I ran from fear. I ran even though Lumanti needed me. She confessed to me because she wanted to stay with her,” he cried. “I wonder if she is frightened?” Chakor covered his jaw, clawed into his faceplate. “Are you disappointed in me too?”

 

“It is not my place,” Genji mused. “But I think most people are too self-involved. I forget what humility looks like until I return here. It is never disappointing to see.” Chakor bowed his head. Genji hugged him, wrapping one the circular joinders at the corner of Chakor’s jaw in his hand. He turned his face in and whispered prospectively to the monk, “Time to go home?”

 

Chakor nodded vigorously, even taking his first jagged step on his own.

 

“I made a mistake,” he admitted.

 

Genji sighed. The electronic sound hurt him to emerge, calling fire up the unused nerves of his sheltered ears, piercing the tear ducts of his closed eyes.

 

“Nothing,” he puffed answer to Chakor’s staring. “It is nothing. Focus. Think upon your actions, and when we reach the top of the mountain, you will be beyond fear.”

 

At the foot of the gravestone rising into the clouds, they encountered the splat of black where Chakor fell to earth. Other sandal steps separated from Chakor’s trail, looping away west.

 

“I am not fast this way,” Chakor muttered as he yoked his arms around Genji’s neck. “Not fast enough for the others.” He gripped Genji’s left thigh with his working leg. He was much heavier than Zenyatta, despite being smaller. Genji’s repositioned swords clattered against his silk. They climbed.

 

Past the cloud layer  a colorless matte sky, the sun a simple paper disc without halo. Genji should have worried: about the ice, about Chakor’s tenuous grip. But the wind danced through his dirty armor and brought the scent of bread and dry wood, and he knew he was close. Chakor’s chest had warmed against his back. Genji reached over the lip of the plateau, distant bells crying golden to his ears.

 

Iron claws snarled around his probing hand and yanked him from the mountain face, tossing him on his side in the shade of a rock pile. Chakor yelped as he landed behind. Lacquered glass talons smashed into Genji’s chest, pinning him over on his back.

 

Red signal bars lunged toward his nose, fanned in triads up either side of a tapering ant-like head. Her vibrant rejections bounced off Genji’s armor and jeweled her white suit collar and silvery tie with threads of color. The dagger fingers bristling around his face cocked backwards.

 

“You fuckin’ idiot--” The bodyguard’s head jerked up as Chakor’s hand crept over Genji, threading toward her hooked toes in an effort to dislodge them. “Little brother!” she squealed, swooping her long legs over Genji to gather Chakor up. He virtually disappeared into the white arms of her suit, and she rose straight with his body draped over her elbows. “I am calling for the engineer,” she cooed at him, touching the cheek of her faceplate to his. “Oh we were all so worried!”

 

Her head twitched at Genji when he stood and shook himself to relieve the snow from his armor. “Genji,” she greeted in new, genial velvet. He glanced at the sidearm sheathed under her coat, and she turned to block his view with Chakor’s suspended body.

 

“Genji rescued me, Miss Stride,” Chakor crackled from the clutch of arms. “Please do not step on him anymore.”

 

“I only did that because he foolishly creeped into the village without announcing himself,” Miss Stride clucked back at her captive, stroking the round pan of his head. Chakor jimmied one of his arms underneath hers and detached the katana straps, holding out the weapons to Genji. Miss Stride’s lights thrashed as Genji retrieved them. “Here come your sisters with the engineer,” she informed Chakor, voice flattened. Three new omnics, two Shambali and the faceless golden skeleton of the engineer, broached the top of the path and bustled down the hill to them. The Shambali’s hands were intertwined.

 

“Brother!” they cried in their bell-like pitches, gliding up to him with hugs and presses of lights. Chakor flinched as he reconnected to their network. While the engineer examined his battered legs, he struggled to peep from the circle of arms at Genji.

 

_Aakhaa: This is embarrassing._

_karroten: The price of being loved is not so high. I will visit you later._

_Aakhaa: Thank you, Brother._

The engineer snapped a couple rods from his back and lined them up to summon a tray of hardlight. Miss Stride lowered Chakor onto the glimmering panel, and he was ferried away by his sisters. Other Shambali met them at the top of the hill, united by their concern, voices flocking together in a single soft song through Genji’s soul. Several noticed him there by the cliff, and nodded shortly to Chakor before running down the path and throwing themselves against him with open arms. He covered their heads, and they his, and for a moment he could not see the holes inside them, under the silk.

 

“I did not expect there to be guards in the village,” he noted to Miss Stride after the last little sister faded away to the train of well-wishers. Stride hissed back at him, adjusting her suit cuffs, glaring down her coat where Chakor’s wounds had turned her less pure than the surrounding snow. As she instructed the fabric nanites to rearrange and slough away her blights, Genji studied the logo printed along the side of her head in a sporty stripe. Someone had been scratching at it for a long time, but he could still read it: _Stride 1.0._ “Were you with Mondatta, too?” he asked, and her lights flooded at him.

 

“It would have been very different if he bothered to bring more than his humans,” she growled.

 

“Do not hold your dreams to that,” Genji offered. Her bars cycled black, holding the darkness almost long enough to be offensive before she turned away. She faced out from the mountain, setting up her surveillance of the clouds below.

 

“You really have become one of them,” she accused. Technologies clicked under the horns coiling from her skull, reeling in additional modes of data. Her array flickered, processing security interchanges.

 

“You do not treat me like them.”

 

“They are yet new.” Miss Stride relaxed her arms into a cross behind her back. “Look at little Chakor, thinking he will survive the world when he has not been out of this village in years. Not since Mondatta stopped taking him. But when I look at you, I still do not know what you are.”

 

“Not trustworthy?” Genji inquired warmly.

 

“That’s not it,” she sniffed. Her synth wavered, becoming wispy. “Though where were you, when he needed you?” The sound hardened, protective steel. “Helping with something very important, I hope.” Her head shifted from the vigil, towards him. “Master Zenyatta,” she demanded.

 

“He is well.” Genji fed his hand up his right antenna. Miss Stride’s face rotated a deeper angle at him, challenging the mild neon of his visor.

 

“Are you sure? He is not responding to anyone’s messages,” she said.

 

“I see,” was his only answer, voice bundling in his throat.

 

“Maybe you are right,” she rasped, turning out to the ambiguity of the curtained sky. “Dreams are useless.”

 

“That is not what I meant, Sister.”

 

Stride grunted disapproval. She pulled a flask from her breast pocket, rigging it with a small straw. When she plugged it towards the terminus of her face, her jaw cracked into two mandibles that manipulated the straw to an uncovered slot.

 

“I assume you did not find the others,” she throbbed as she drained the bottle.

 

“Their tracks are getting buried by the snow. I had to return Chakor. You can’t look for them?” Genji wondered.

 

“Orders. Always the boss has orders to keep me from doing my job. He sent some drones out.” Genji patted her shoulder. She rotated the point of her jacket away from him. “Idiot old man. Though I suppose if the lost brothers are in a state like Chakor’s, they might let themselves be found by such crude measures.” Her sentence punctuated in a gash of steam from the bony spine of her neck.

 

“Have you ever tried speaking to the Shambali about your anger?” Genji suggested as softly as he could.

 

“Anger?” Miss Stride clacked, free hand curling a fist as she looked at him. “What makes you think I am angry?”

 

“Uh…”

 

“I am angry,” she allowed. “About Mondatta. He was supposed to be important. But now the Shambali will learn how fast the world forgets. He stopped listening to me.” Her mandibles rattled. “They all did.”

 

“Why?” Genji asked, and Miss Stride contemplated her flask before rising back at him.

 

“They thought I was just angry,” she said dryly. Genji snickered with her. Her array shifted, climbing shades towards canary yellow.

 

She sent him a friend request.

 

He perked onto his toes, brightening at her as he accepted. She regarded him in cooling pink. “The world will change,” she said. “If even Shambali can lose the faith, we will all need each other.” She popped the straw out, folding it into a cigarette box and shielding it and the flask under the breast of her suit coat. Her faceparts locked back into a smooth mouthless plate. “What do you want?” she guided Genji. He ruminated at the cloud bank with her.

 

“Where is Lumanti?” he asked.

 

“Still with him.” Miss Stride poked a finger heavenward. “All the way at the top. You will have trouble getting in if you take the door.”

 

“Will I?” Genji bowed to her. “Thank you.”

 

Dead thickets wired the walls of the village houses. Yellow flowers clustered along the front of the stable. Around the shrine a hundred Shambali adherents prostrated themselves in the snow, shackles of ice creeping up their wrists. Bowed ochre bodies singing in low metal echoes clogged the tunnels through the heart of the mountain. A couple bodyguards stood outside the tunnel gate, neat black crows surveying the masses. They took no special notice of the ghost standing amidst the colorful robes. One of them sat down on the short wall lining the gate steps, tearing off his sunglasses and cleaning water from his eyes with the back of his hand. He had to be shouted back to duty by his counterpart.

 

Genji skipped the gate and followed the lining of the mountain, driving the machetes of his legs through the snow and ice. Fractal dragons, green and gold, painted his path: the tinted silhouettes of sunlight passing through the monastery pennants. The grounds were nearly deserted. A few monks sat among the enormous statues, locked in identical poses of meditation, seeking unity with the stone that could not feel.

 

The castle of the Shambali did not have doors, but today a murky purple curtain hung across the inner arch, a dozen or so wingtip derbies visible under the edge. Genji could hear the guards’ fingers on their tablets, and their hushed voices spitting into mouthpieces. He clambered up the wall, scampering from brick crevice to windowsill, the coals of the braziers blowing orange against his feet. Frost burned through the nose of his helmet. Anemic gusts of ice turned heroic as they channeled along the castle face, scalding his padding. Genji adjusted his thermal conditioning. Hopping from the greatest of the yellow towers to the frame of the monastery skylight, he looked inside.

 

Wheels of omnicode rotated on suspended pulsing poles throughout the atrium. Individual symbols burst free of holographic rings, spun like dead leaves, and sparked out of existence. Spheres bloomed and shattered on the central axis, bleaching the walls in starry light. Mondatta lay in a circle of etched glyphs on the podium, white face staring up the smoky chaos of the room at Genji, chest split by the purple of the hologram’s middle spire.

 

Genji identified the back of Lumanti’s bowed head. She knelt beside the Master, still in her rain-soaked robe, the blue pond of her skirt flaring around them both. A handful of other Shambali lurked in alcoves and pathways among dim stacks of candles. Aside from pots of incense, Lumanti was alone with Mondatta on the podium. Genji exhaled as he dragged his toes and knees over the edge of the skylight. The crust of snow around the skylight cracked apart under his entering weight, jigsaw fluff dissolving to glitter as it passed through the chains of silent screaming.

 

Gravity held his feet and guided him. The Net handle _samss_ joined his contacts, lingering with him as he plummeted down the riled lights. He caught his momentum with a charge of the boosters in his legs, and smacked the podium hard on his heels. _samss_ vanished. Lumanti’s head snapped up with a gasp.

 

Diamonds followed Genji from the sky, the last of the snow falling as rain, chiming the metal floor and metal bodies.

 

Lumanti lifted her hand, her arm extending in a blue wing across Mondatta. She turned her wrist over and showed Genji the circles on her palm.

 

“You finally came to visit, Brother,” she whimpered. Genji stalked around the body and pushed past her shaking arm to hug her. Her synthesizer volume rose, groping wordless into the air. The other Shambali clung to their static compositions of peace, hearing and seeing nothing. Lumanti viewed their delicate folded bodies over Genji’s shoulder, and muted herself mid-cry. Genji caressed the upper centimeters of her connectors and cables, and when she relaxed, he repeated the motion. Over and over, while he gazed past her at Mondatta, his lights as black as his eyes.

 

Crumbs of London grit stuck to Lumanti’s face and neck, but her hands washed clean-- her fingers tied into Mondatta’s even as she leaned on Genji’s chest. She had not changed, but Mondatta was reconstructed in the yellows and browns of his life in the village. His body was spotless, aside from where the metal stitched together with thin lines of glue. Nine spheres fanned around his head, hovering on couches of light like the statues outside.

 

Genji got up, Lumanti’s arms fading from him instantly. Her face followed him as he walked up the steps from the podium. A set of incense sticks lay on a cloth beside some candles and a meditating Shambali. Genji lit a stick and ferried it back to the jar by Lumanti’s knees, the closest to Mondatta. The scented smoke traveled around their bodies in lazy tentacles, and Lumanti nodded.

 

What Genji at first thought was the tap of melted snowdrops on Mondatta’s faceplate resolved into footsteps approaching them from behind. Sandals, and he did not recognize an omnic consistency to the step. He twisted at the track of wooden-soled disturbances stopping by the podium staircase.

 

A boy stood at the top of the steps in a tiger orange robe, a blanket of green-yellow yak fur around his shoulders and another draped over his arm. Fresh rags steamed in his hand, and a teacup handle hung in precarious suspension from his little finger. The golden apple and lemon tones of the cardamom in the cup cut a swathe through the incense. The boy’s bare brown arms were a little thin from a comfortable life. He shaved his hair, but not recently, and the newest crop of black shaded the perimeter of his skull. His eyes showed their whites, just as surprised as Genji to see the other there.

 

The boy started to smile hello, but caught himself and settled for bringing his hands close together just beneath his chin. Lumanti turned toward him, and his russet eyes caught the gold of the candles as they snapped to her, and Genji’s arm around her.

 

“Give us some time, Hira?” she asked, and he jerked alert, then nodded and excused himself silently down a hallway. Lumanti sighed. “He is one of our humans,” she explained. “I will introduce you properly, once everything is prepared.” She toyed with the mellow green rings on Genji’s shoulder.

 

“The Iris tells you what to do?” Genji guessed.

 

“Master left instructions,” Lumanti heaved out. “I must do as our friends in the village ask as well. This is the hardest part. They want us to wait three days. They are summoning their families, preparing flowers, though they say the reason we must wait three days is because his soul does not leave right away. That it is here, in this room.” Red from the spiraling holograms dyed their bodies. “Do you have any rites you wish to perform, Genji?” Her expressionless face adjusted up from a blank stare at his ribs.

 

“I should not act like I know any more than you about this part,” Genji thought aloud, settling himself on crossed legs, resting his hands on the intersection of his ankles. “What will you do with the body?”

 

“He asked that we donate what we can. We will melt the rest,” Lumanti relayed, her voice restrained to a monotone.

 

“Maybe take some of the white flowers from the shrine and put them with him,” Genji proposed. “That is all I can remember from my mother’s. Do you have anything I can wear?”

 

“I am sure Chakor can help you, now that you have been so kind as to retrieve him,” Lumanti recited in dull congratulations. Genji rubbed the nodes of her back, drawing her in by the shoulder so he could kiss her temple, her seven lights fizzing reflections on his face.

 

The lights saturated an auroral powder blue, her head rose, and she searched the air around them. He followed her quest through the empty hall, bewildered.

 

Then he understood.

 

“No,” he corrected her. Color and light filled her even when she looked back at him, shuttered only with the drop of her head in a delayed, defeated nod. “I will deal with him later,” Genji promised in an icy hiss. Her hand tightened and smoothed against his shoulder.

 

“Please do not let your anger stand before the truth,” she advised in a faint tone, the bitter caricature of teacher to student.

 

They sighed together.

 

As his arm trailed off her back, he chanced across the roots of red cables circling from her robes. Mondatta, too. The Shambali laced blushing paths across each other, locking to opposing outlets on the podium. It was Genji’s turn to get starry-eyed.

 

“Does it--” He reached at the crimson pouring from Mondatta into the computer. “Can it--?”

 

“His connection is symbolic only,” Lumanti answered, synth tolling for a world more like Genji’s daydreams. “All of this is.” She gestured at the body, at her and him beside it, at the meditations enveloping the monastery. “We must express ourselves always.”

 

“And yours?”

 

Lumanti glanced at her ropes of lifeblood coiling into the podium.

 

“Oh. I was trying to calm this one.” Her arm lifted to the holograms turning bloody crowns overhead. Staring at the outlet, Genji reached behind his neck and scratched at the heavy chrome scales sheltering his spine. Lumanti perked. “Do you want to try? There is so much fear and doubt.” Genji lowered his hand.

 

“I am not sure meeting me would help anyone with that,” he chuckled. Lumanti rested the curl of her slender finger to the point of her jaw.

 

“I had one other idea. Perhaps you could help me, tonight?”

 

“Tonight,” he agreed, collecting her hand in his. “What do you want me to do until then?”

 

“Well.” Lumanti turned to Mondatta. “I will be here.” Genji signaled his willingness to wait with two fingers in salute just under his chin.

 

“May I touch him?” he asked.

 

Lumanti nodded, her teal array intensifying. She shuddered when Genji folded his other hand over the back of Mondatta’s, fingers crossing with hers. Genji glanced at her as they turned Mondatta’s palm up together. The Shambali leader was cold, like he had been in their shared dream. “Is it something forbidden?” he asked. “Are only these few allowed normally?” He sketched his fingers through the lines in Mondatta’s palm, leaving traces of unanswered green light.

 

“When my brothers and sisters knock, I will answer,” Lumanti swore, shaking her head. “I am sure they will all get past their fear of seeing him by tomorrow. Then Master will not be so alone.” Genji bowed his head, squeezing her closer. The upside-down pyramid of her array dwindled to a single active light as they waited in silence.

 

“I got ahead of myself,” Genji told the body of Mondatta. Lumanti sat up, twisting between him and the corpse. “I thought I understood, but I didn’t, and I was not prepared. Lumanti is right. Even now, I anger too easily. Anger might be easy and destructive, but I do not fear it. What I fear is that maybe in my anger I did not look hard enough. I forgot that you both chose to live in this world too, not just above it…” He looked to the skylight. “Somewhere.”

 

“You speak to him?” Lumanti inquired. Genji turned his visor to her.

 

“Of course.”

 

“Does he speak back?” she begged. Genji shook his head slowly, and her array brightened in unsteady lines, tarnished face canting at him.

 

“Sort of,” he elaborated. “It is another expression.” Lumanti set both hands over Mondatta’s wrist, and stared at her newest teacher. “You speak to him, and imagine what he would say back. Then, it is like he is still alive.” Genji shrugged. “I did not get to see my father’s funeral. But when he was still at the house, I tried saying words that would make him reply with something funny, and then it didn’t hurt--”

 

“I love you, Mondatta,” Lumanti told the body.

 

After a few seconds, she withdrew from Mondatta’s arm. Her lights faded in and out with tide-like swells. He thought she might have muted her synthesizer again.

 

Lumanti shuffled her collapse of legs into a compact seat, touching her thumbs and index fingers and relaxing the other digits out over her knees. Genji joined her in meditation.

 

_Let it pass._

 

The skylight tinted violet before Lumanti spoke again: “Could you find Hira for me?”

 

“No need.” Genji heard the boy’s footsteps, with guests, entering the chamber. Hira, a couple Shambali, and the engineer emerged from the eastern hallway. The engineer carried a white mask in his hands. Hira spooked a little when he noticed Genji and Lumanti already leering over their shoulders at him.

 

“I apologize,” he blurted, scratching the back of his ear and glancing at the engineer. “He insisted.”

 

“There is never need for apology,” Lumanti said, and she unplugged herself from the podium, rising at last on her own power.

 

“Right,” Hira muttered as she approached him and his entourage, Genji her pale shadow.

 

“You had it already, my friend?” Lumanti asked the engineer, both hands outstretched.

 

“My dear,” the engineer hummed, circling the mask with his fingers before he turned it over. His synthesizer wizened at her, the cut of an onion from the drying vine: “You are in a state.” Hira glared at him. Lumanti and Genji investigated the mask. Genji poked the apostrophes rising from the corners of the eyeslots, and bounced his fingers across the hard bubbles of the seven light fixtures. Shallow etchings over the top and sides filled with shadows when Lumanti tipped the white plate in her hands, revealing soft patterns like vines, flowers, wires, and eyes. “Mondatta ordered it long ago,” the engineer grunted onward, a little keen to Hira’s fierce stare. “But if there are any modifications you need, I should prepare them before the ceremony. Do you not agree?”

 

“If this is what Master picked out, it is fine as it is,” Lumanti said, voice sticking to her throat. “Though I have no guarantee for you that I will need it so soon.” She grazed the turquoise points embedded along the sides. “I have yet to create a single one of the required accessories.” Maybe she meant to laugh, but it came out like a lost breath.

 

“You should not doubt yourself like that,” Hira insisted, his whole forehead digging at his eyes. He was so expressive, Genji thought. He was going to get old. Maybe it was the lack of hair to distract from his tender humanity that painted him so vivid. Lumanti lifted her palm, and Hira turned his cheek, falling silent.

 

“Ah.” The engineer’s blank golden head ticked at the air as he thought. “How about the frame?” His hand unfolded toward Lumanti.

 

“I have no need to be a copy,” she murmured. She returned the mask. “Keep this for me until it is time, will you?”

 

“Of course.” The reflections on the engineer’s faceplate shifted from Genji and Lumanti to Mondatta in his lonely repose. “Anything, you know. Anything for you.”

 

The other Shambali escorted the golden omnic out. Lumanti tapped Hira’s shoulder when he moved to follow. He turned back to her in a glide of sunset fabrics, eyes searching up and down her face.

 

“Could you stay here a little while?” Lumanti asked, appraising the yak blanket warming Hira’s shoulders with her fingertips. “In my place. I do not want to leave him alone, but I have to…” Hira walked past her before she finished excusing herself. He clapped his hands together briefly when he reached Mondatta, and whispered a prayer about Paradise. Then he unshelved the blanket from his back and spread it out beside the body.

 

“I had been looking for a moment to chat,” he announced for their benefit. He crossed his legs, and his shoulders relaxed as he looked across Mondatta’s chrysanthemum of wires.

 

Lumanti led Genji out to the cavern passage.

 

“What was that about?” Genji asked as they descended the mountain’s submerged corridors. He patted his face when Lumanti glanced at him.

 

“Overexpectation.” She straightened the drooping cuffs of her sleeves, and adjusted her cabling back under her sash.

 

“Mondatta, expecting too much?” he drawled.

 

“Master had many dreams,” Lumanti hummed to herself. “Comparing myself to him, I never knew which way to grow. Trying to walk and learn as he did, I remain only an imitation.” The oily electric scent of Chakor’s broken legs returned to Genji, haunting him as Lumanti took his hand. She guided him around the fork in the path to the empty springs of the Shambali. Inside she looked at him, and he reflexively reviewed downward: grains of mulch shed from his seams with every step. Pats of beach sand fell from his knee joints.

 

“Mondatta,” he realized in a cold stroke of horror, turning up his hands. “When I touched him…” Lumanti pulled his arms down.

 

“These are the fruits of your compassion. It is what the savior of our brother looks like. I am sure he does not mind.” She exhaled in a ripple of static. “And I am certain Hira will see to it. So we will do what we can now, and not worry about the past.” Her fingers tightened against him. Genji nodded quickly, and scooted into the washroom.

 

He was reborn, white and slick, a towel tying his waist, and a broken ribbon in his hand. Lumanti greeted him in a bathrobe, dirty blues bundled on her arm. She had a second robe for him, sized for a typical Shambali, so the fringe that hung below her knees hovered above his. She twinkled curiously at the ribbon in his hand, and leaned forward to peer behind his helmet.

 

“Don’t look,” Genji warned, turning his face aside and incidentally revealing where the ribbon had torn itself in half, the toothy remains splaying over his shoulder. “I am going bald.” Lumanti poked his hard bicep, and her array gained a splash of new color. She requested the scrap from him with an open palm.

 

“Let me make a new one for you,” she said.

 

“Not Chakor?”

 

“I want to,” she insisted, folding the ribbon across the remains of her robe. She looked back up to him, and before he could even speak, asked him, “What is it?” Genji’s visor flushed.

 

“There was something weird on the ceiling,” he told her in a small voice, turning to the side and looking down the shadowy tunnel to the showers. Lumanti’s shoulders rose.

 

Together they entered the grotto, dove stone spreading into scales of ceramic under their feet. The salty cling of mineral washes in the air evidenced the shower’s recent use. As they came to the center of the room, Genji lifted his chin at the bioluminescent fungi making a universe across the roof. Fresh, clean water dribbled from spiral neon tongues, cold supplements to the ordinary shower faucets. Pockets of vegetation spritzed across the canvas like blacklight graffiti.

 

The porous rock foundation morphed to blue and wiry metal in irregular mottles throughout the ceiling. Fully-grown nodes of light bubbled out in clusters, surrounded by mushrooms that attached to the mechanalia as easily as the stone. Vines of plant life webbed every wire, initiating the process of growing into stout, veiny trunks.

 

Against a far wall away from the showerheads, a seep of wire and silver dripped to accessibility. Genji touched Lumanti’s hand to it. The indicators across their bodies swept to full power, radioactive jewels merging into rich turquoise. Currents of sunlight emerged from within the wiring to nourish their fingers, lighting up their comparatively small systems, pumping out of the mountain warm as summer.

 

Glints of ore assembled and dulled throughout the wire’s accompanying stain of metal, fish of the iron sea. “Nanomachines?” Genji asked. Lumanti nodded. “Do you know where they are coming from?”

 

Lumanti withdrew her hand from the wall, her face turning across the cavern’s colorful stars. “The computer?” Genji prodded.

 

“Yes. I will show you. Come,” she ordered.

 

Bodhisattvas with shrines of cloth and beads on their wrists smiled at the pair of machines winding down the path to the shrine. The youthful, chubby-cheeked face of the lowest statue masked half in metal, nanites creeping onto its skull from the wall behind. A luminescing white flower with a hundred curly petals bloomed in the saint’s wiry hair.

 

Mondatta’s expired guardians nodded to Lumanti as she exited the mountain, quelching the silence of her passing with their curt “ma’am”s. Shambali lay around the shrine in the dark, the lights on their heads piercing sleepless blue. Lumanti inhaled as she collected them all with a swivel of her face. She placed her dirty clothing on the snow, then went to the nearest huddled body.

 

“Sister,” she whispered, touching a sunken shoulder from which the yellow robe catch had slipped. The opalescent pyramid of the other omnic’s head raised a tapered prow. “You must rest,” Lumanti insisted. “Please go to your bed. Do you need help reaching it?” Her arm hovered close to the pyramid’s, but the adherent staggered up on her own. She pulled her robes into place, and bobbed her head to Lumanti before lumbering off under the red crest of a nearby building.

 

Lumanti returned to the guards. “Please,” she said, face tilting from one human to the other. “They need to sleep. They cannot remain like this. Can you help me guide them home? It may take a little while,” she admitted.

 

“You need to relay that request to the chief,” one of the guards said.

 

“I’ll help,” answered the other. He waved off the incredulity of his partner. “You can watch. You’ve got two eyes.”

 

Lumanti only glanced at Genji, and he went to coax his nearest brothers to their feet.

 

Some of the Shambali proved well enough to assist once roused, and soon pairs and flocks of monks were escorting each other to the buildings surrounding the shrine, or the houses in the village below. The less intact only needed to be ushered so far as to lay their bodies on the nearest empty cushions, where they could be soothed to sleep with blankets and slow hands across their foreheads. Genji carried some of them.

 

“Brother…” a monk exclaimed groggily from Genji’s arms as Genji passed under the threshold of a common room. Genji tapped the Shambali’s head with his chin, and his brother slung arms around him. “You are here…!” Genji lowered him to a vacant dais, and touched a finger to his mouthseam, glancing around at the other bodies already dozing in the room. His brother quieted, falling asleep almost as fast as Genji could straighten his back. Some of the monks were like that, filled with fits of restlessness when he disturbed their mindless prayers. Others rose easily, as though simply shook awake from meditations they had held too long.

 

It took him, Lumanti, and the bodyguard working together to lift a rabbit-legged adherent with a deconstructed cannon holster on her shoulder, and an empty minigun sling replacing one of her hands. She responded to their grunts of encouragement with a withered monotone signal, and her lone circular headlight beamed scarlet against the snow. A Shambali robe did not fit her, and she stomped off with wreathes of white hexagonals radiating from her neck and elbows instead. Her holographic petals flapped over the streams of Russian stenciled down her back.

 

After his final rounds scouring for lost sisters and brothers, Genji met up with Lumanti in the village. It was nearing midnight. She gazed at the moon over the monastery, one hand webbed to her mouthseam, the other clutching the fold of her white terrycloth. But when she spotted him, ascending bright and slightly fluffy in the moonlight, her arms eased away to her sides, her stance relaxing. She led him into her home.

 

He waited by her garden in the window while she changed, breathing the pocket pungency of the tomatoes, running his thumb beneath the dark wilting leaves. Lumanti emerged in a plain ochre robe that slipped tight under her right armpit, covering her chassis but baring her shoulder. She handed him its twin, “Until Chakor is well enough to help you.” When he scaled the cloth snug to his chest, she moved closer and pulled it loose, exposing the wing of his right breast.

 

Genji tried throwing the lengthy sash over his shoulder like Mondatta, and Lumanti was there again, pulling down the dark purple silk and lashing it in a thick band around his waist. “For the funeral, you will have to do it yourself,” she chided. “I will inspect it.”

 

“Master thinks I am a fast learner,” he offered meekly. They both turned to the swords Genji had discarded in her living room chair so he could dress. “When I am ready to leave,” Genji summoned Lumanti’s attention. “I will come back for them. Is that okay?” Lumanti clenched her hands as she nodded.

 

“Eventually we must return all the way to the top,” she confessed as they stepped onto the porch of the corner house with the amber roof. Genji modified his thermal sensitivity, let the wind snap against his bare shoulder.

 

“Good to build muscle,” he said. Lumanti knocked his silk-shrouded breastplate.

 

“Do not dare to tease me now, Brother,” she warned. “This way…”

 

They walked through the village, the wind just high enough to dry the sobbing from the windows.

 

“Did you think the moon was beautiful?” he asked Lumanti as she peered at the upper floor of one of the houses. “Is that why you were looking at it?” She shivered, but looked with him up the cloudy tracks of the night. The distant world was full and gray, dotted with pools of light and shadowy towers.

 

“Humans cannot live on the moon,” she replied. “And I am childish.” Her lights blinked as Genji scrubbed the side of his hand at his chin.

 

“Not on the surface,” he agreed. “But they can live in a house! And they put all the other monkeys in the house to live with them.”

 

Lumanti finally laughed, her frame wobbling with the effort.

 

“They are apes, Genji.”

 

“What is the difference?” he asked.

 

“Well…I guess a monkey has a tail,” she surmised, though she did not sound too confident on the subject. “So a human is an ape. So is a gorilla.”

 

“So is an omnic?” he proposed. She shook her head. “You are a monkey then!” he declared.

 

“Stop!” she squealed, grabbing his waistband and pulling on him. Genji let her tug him off-step, always finding his balance before his foot landed again. “It does not matter what anyone is.” She covered her face with both hands, array flickering back to a sense of decorum.

 

They arrived at Mondatta’s home.

 

The broom lay akilter against the door, expecting a late night of cleaning. Lumanti arranged it back against the wall. Genji glanced at their footprints collecting in the snow on the doorstep, and made a note to sweep when he could.

 

They entered to automatic electric gold from the ceiling fixtures, the windows of the house alive again in the twilight. Lumanti crossed her arms around her robe, head twisting across the huge, warm, empty room with its bone-white couches and inactive monitors. “I thought perhaps the others who went missing might have taken refuge here,” she explained without looking at Genji, knowing his eyes were on her.

 

“There were some with Chakor,” he replied. “But they went a different direction.” Lumanti paced across the cherrywood.

 

“How many tracks did you see?” She drew aside the velvet curtain partitioning the living room and kitchen.

 

“Two others,” Genji reported after reviewing his data feeds. “But the snow will have hidden them by now.”

 

“Just two…” Lumanti opened the kitchen icebox to confirm its perishables, mostly bottles of the homebrewed rice liquors Mondatta kept for guests. Maple wood and stone consumed the air beyond the curtain, a castle sitting in that tiny boarded room. A jar of black-brown fluid sat on the countertop, turning amber when Genji held it to the nearest bulb. Lumanti busied herself opening and closing cupboards with nothing but plates and glasses inside.

 

“What are you thinking?” he asked her.

 

“Nhu would never abandon his brother.” She kept taking the glasses out and striking dust off the rims with her index finger. Most of the dirt she attacked was imaginary. “He must not have been with them.” Genji collected her midsection in his arm when she strained up on her sandal toes to access a shelf beyond her height. Lumanti settled for his embrace, eyeslots locked on the grain of the closed cupboard doors. “Perhaps he is just having trouble finding his way home.” Her voice grated. She flicked her fingers across her brow. “For some of them, it hurt more.” She turned her head aside to Genji. “I did not see enough to know where he was. Did you feel him too?”

 

“Yes.” The yellow lotus frozen in a cave, a corpse his only company. Genji released Lumanti. “I can look for him.”

 

“After the funeral.” Lumanti lowered her head. “Please.” Genji nodded. Her voice rose: “Of all my brothers,” she cursed. “He has never wanted to leave the village since we found it. In the beginning, Master had to drag him along. He surely picked a poor moment to become adventurous!” She whipped away from the counter, planted her hand up the banister of the stairwell, and stamped her foot to the first step.

 

Ahead lay the short, narrow ascent to the closed bedroom door. It was the shadow on a trail between mountainous pines, or the lightless corner of an otherwise familiar attic. Lumanti’s weight creaked across the step, the current of sound stiffening her whole body, one long silver ache. She broke free, and Genji followed. From behind, she looked like a smaller Zenyatta making a strange effort to connect her feet with the unworthy ground. The staircase lamp must have shorted; it did not turn on as they climbed. Only their lights, blue and green, faded up the steps.

 

Her voice flowed to Genji small and hushed, a ghost in the staircase, “Do you think he was lonely?” She slid open the door, the moon leaping through the window on the far wall to line her in silver. “Coming back to this place every day.” Her head twisted toward the bed on the floor, pressed sheets still waiting for the missed night of dreams. The mattress propped on the wall was gone. “Without Master Zenyatta here.”

 

“How could the leader of the Shambali be lonely?” Genji maintained his sunny counter, squeezing past Lumanti with a green smile of his visor. “Here a hug is a hello.”

 

“Can an embrace happen so many times as to become meaningless?” Lumanti was still staring at the bed. Genji wove his arms around her from the side and she peeped surprise. He rested his chin on the top of her head, his bare neck pressing into her cheek.

 

“Does it feel meaningless?” he asked. Lumanti shook denial under him, hands making butterflies across his white arms. Genji lowered the prow of his mask, burrowing against her face. “It was never your responsibility.”

 

“The Masters are the reason we exist.” Her fingers held around his forearm, warm and trembling. “My entire life…”

 

“They do not want servants,” Genji interrupted firmly, covering her head. “Mondatta only asked you to worship one thing, right?”

 

“I cannot touch the Iris,” Lumanti’s voice broke. “I do not know how. But I could touch Master. I could see him right in front of me!”

 

“If you really want what your Master does, you have to learn to be your own person,” he insisted. “Like I told you before.” He poked her nonexistent nose.

 

“Is that why Master Zenyatta will not come here?” she asked.

 

“What?” Genji’s finger lapsed off her face. Lumanti turned in his arms, facing him, tall and straight as she could stand on her thin steel sandals.

 

“He is a Master. He could have everything Mondatta has built,” she said. “But he would rather let us decide for ourselves what to do.”

 

“That’s--” Genji considered, lights growing pale. “Um.” He swallowed.

 

“Maybe they even talked about it,” Lumanti murmured. “Master Mondatta was so prepared for everything.” She rocked back in his arm, rubbing her palms together, her inverted pyramid dull.

 

“I don’t think Mondatta was afraid,” Genji answered tightly. “Zenyatta and Mondatta,” he breathed, visor light narrowing. “It must have never mattered how far apart their bodies were. They were always together.” He eased back from her, standing heavy-armed in the mouth of the quiet room. “Now Zenyatta is the one who is alone.” The green stripe darkened. “I guess.”

 

Lumanti spread her hand over his heart.

 

“Just a moment.” She turned away to the wardrobe in the corner, pulling out a drawer and bouncing her loose fists on the rim, thinking. Genji spied a few diamonds of cream inside. “I will have to pick something for him to wear at the ceremony,” she recited to herself, retrieving a couple blue sashes and shutting the drawer. She walked to the moonlit window screen.

 

“He looked comfortable in what you chose already,” Genji noted as he followed, his voice clear again.

 

“The others will insist.” Lumanti perked on her toes, scavenging across the wood-and-metal ledges above the window. To Genji’s surprise, the nine ringed spheres he had discovered there so long ago were still present, resting in their niches.

 

“The ones with his body?” he wondered.

 

“Symbolic.” Lumanti accessed the first dormant bead, her arms sinking with the capture of it. She groaned, balancing the dark sphere within the cloth so they could study its rippled metal. Genji picked the other sash from her forearm and gathered his own specimen. It was freezing cold, with the weight of the universe inside its shell. He toggled his fingertip along the carving lines, tapped the ajar rings into place, reassembling the surface to something smooth and graceful. Lumanti headed downstairs. Arms shuddering with the effort, Genji cuddled the sphere to his chest.

 

Cloaked witches ascending the mountain in the night, they crossed the empty shrine grounds and entered the gate to the heart of stone. Lumanti hummed to herself as they followed a tributary of the mountain river, the same pacekeeping notes as Zenyatta’s meditations.

 

She took a passage away from the installed lights. They crossed the river on a bridge of hardlight that only showed itself as her foot plunged toward the water, and it disappeared again behind them. Genji gazed over his shoulder, and smacked into the hard pillar of her body as she stopped in front of him.

 

The route ended in an empty room bordered on three sides by cheeseholes in the wall dumping rushes of river water along the rock. The air was a few degrees warmer than the rest of the caverns. Microscopic tremors buzzed up Genji’s heels, seeping along the back of his thighs to his spine. Squeaking in the walls, but no holes, no crevices, the cave smoothed to sandstone by the prehistoric waters.

 

Invisible pins pushed through his padding into his nerves, body dragged naked into the humidity, the soft flecks of water fountaining into the air, and the churning of the river all around him. The drag of the bauble he carried infected his chest, sinking his heart to his ankles. Lumanti walked on the water, straight across the widest of the room’s thrashing moats. He could not see any hardlight crystallizing beneath her. The river itself slowed, ripples of gold blooming from each touch of her sandals. A diadem of snowy light switched on as she neared the wall, shining off her skull. Her back crooked, armored nodes pressed into relief against her robe back as she rolled the sphere to the care of one elbow. The flat gray clap of her freed hand rocked up and down the wall.

 

The stone sprang apart, disgorging glistening electronic blueprints, calligraphies of interconnected flowers and omnicode. The wall shed its imitation texture, choruses of nanomachines reeling out from Lumanti’s palm. Like an amateur drawing curtains in sloppy, muffled flaps, a doorway appeared. A draft exploded wings through Lumanti’s robe, bit into Genji’s face with solstice heat. The river broke apart, washing up the first few meters of revealed plasmetal corrugate.

 

Beyond lay an egg-shaped room surrounded by water. The mountain’s arteries circled an island in the center of the floor. Rivers whispered in the walls. The island was an even dome studded by pearly antennae, a Stonehenge arrangement surrounding a thick middle spire. That principle pillar turned reedy at top and bottom, unfurling into thousands of cables at either end. Motherboards and ventilators and connectors watched over the configuration from the walls. The island wired to the shore with regular white bridges looping over the river.

 

A white phantom, bent and faceless, glided out of the mountain’s heart toward him.

 

“Genji.” The warmth of Lumanti’s hand suffused his lower arm. His visor snapped onto her, bright in alarm. Her bony color was from the light over the doorway. “Can you see me?” Genji searched down her body, trying to make sense of her cowed posture. He removed her comforting hand back to her sphere. She rebalanced the weight of it and straightened, blue lights flush at him.

 

“I just got a little sick,” he excused, but even though she was clear and radiant before him now, he was not sure if the explanation was correct. It did not have the hallmarks of a nightmare. What he thought was fear proved less easily categorized. He was still shivering. The wet air was a hand on the back of his head, sinking into his brain.

 

Sometimes such ambiguities were an aftershock. That was why there were questions. _Do you know where you are? Can you see me?_ All the Shambali knew them. It was those moments, occurring for no discernible reason at all, that left him weakest. Years of work turned into several seconds of screaming at Zenyatta, _“I’m broken, I’m broken!_ ” Like a child. I slipped on the ice and now I am broken forever, Master.

 

Zenyatta taught him to walk the unknown. This was different: his body did not expand to clog every corner of time and space with its throes. This time the world was rushing into him, filling him up.

 

All the same, Genji walked. His green flashlight peeled back the shoreline, showed him how the water beyond coursed paper-thin. Nicks and slashes coated the surrounding rock, like a flock of vultures had once gathered there. Translucent figures swam away from his feet as he crossed to the other side.

 

Above slats in the ceiling reclined the towering body of the computer. Turquoise gloom stuffed the metal channel between its LED fixtures, blocking all view of the podium and holograms at the top. Closer to the center of the egg-shaped room, bulbous wires made a gummy floor beneath his feet. He followed Lumanti across one of the white petals and moved through the forest of sensors, arriving at the wired stalk in the center of the Shambali computer.

 

Lumanti ducked her head to the vanilla white paneling. “Please,” she requested. The sheath around the spire clicked apart, folding away the barrier between the two of them and the shiny black core. The gravity pulsing through Genji’s body washed away.

 

He smelled some close kin of antiseptics, a catheter sting across his sensors before he acclimated. Nocked onto a pedestal inside the spire was a broken teal chunk of machinery. It bled iridescence, and thin syrups of water and oil flushed continuously down its sides from nozzles in the roof of its resting place. Every centimeter of its glowing body was threaded by sticky wiring. A few bloody orange holograms in dormant pools around the base of the configuration, the same shade as the angry rings over Mondatta’s corpse. “Genji, this is Tekhartha,” Lumanti said. One shallow hologram spiked upward as she spoke, visualizing a soundwave of her voice.

 

 _samss_ manifested in Genji’s contacts. Supple cables popped from ports at the top of the spire, winding together as they descended, and extending iridescent wires over Lumanti’s array. The nanomechanical feeds adjusted over the top of her head, reaching behind her to access her red primaries, while she stood completely still.

 

One cable switched directions toward Genji, splitting again into fluid twins. The rainbow webs filled his visor. As the spectrum thickened, blinding him, another cable head bumped into his armored neck, and crawled around, unable to decipher the closed scales. He imitated Lumanti, and eventually the cables blundered off his helmet to lie in repose beneath the waterfall shard.

 

“Maybe…” Lumanti’s voice was very watery. “I should have said something. Many of Tekhartha’s primary processes require physical contact--”

 

“‘A hug is a hello’,” Genji repeated, winking his visor at her. He glanced at the visual echoes of their conversation rippling around the machine, and leaned closer to the colorful graphics, only to catch himself and transform into a greeting bow.

 

It was as he hiked his body and the sphere back up that he noticed the blankets folded around the spire, and all across the island. Piles of books, writing paper. Clay figurines hung from the inner faces of the antennae surrounding Tekhartha’s resting place, dots poked in their heads. Crayola sketches too. He moved toward a drawing so fresh it still oozed the chalky perfume of crayon peels.

 

The white space on the paper made a beach. The artist surrounded the void of sand with tall ebony cliffs, brackish rocks climbing from the blue sweeps of the sea head. In the distance, green-mouthed obelisks of indeterminate purpose floated straight out of the water. A puff of pink and black wire marked a single tree standing above the ocean, and a yellowy-green serpentine of light floated along the scribbled whitecaps. Most of the drawings were scenery like that: not the cave, or even the Nepali mountains, but places far away, filled with flowers. “Always thought his name was Sam,” Genji muttered.

 

He waddled back to Lumanti with the sphere dragging his arms nearly from their sockets. She tilted her head. “ _sam-s-s,_ ” he enunciated. Lumanti laughed sharply. Genji looked around the room. “Omniums are much prettier than I expected.”

 

Lumanti’s shoulders popped up, and she looked aside, lights fluttering.

 

“I am glad,” she exhaled. Genji shifted his head, requesting a meeting of eyes. She answered him, brighter blue. “You are not angry. You…will not get your swords.” Genji drew his head back.

 

“Mondatta told you about me,” he reasoned, and bowed his head. “Luckily, Overwatch is dead.” He thought briefly of the shuttle waiting for him in the valley. “That organization is gone. But it would not matter, Lumanti. I trust you. I love my family.” He looked up the spire.

 

“We love you.” She avoided diminishing into a mouse-like posture, even if her voice rang very small next to his confident warmth. When he only stared at her, she recalled their purpose. “Here.” She turned to Tekhartha and thrust her sphere into one of eighteen niches carved in a lacquered wooden ledge below the shard. The sphere rocked once before settling boulder-like on the wood.

 

Lumanti folded her hands together in front of her stomach. As they watched, blue light crawled into the seams between the rings, and the sphere lifted a breath off the ledge, hovering without assistance. The rings broke out from its body, turning once around like a system of orbits around the sun, then shuttered back to the smooth golden shell. The sphere bobbed in place, turning slowly.

 

Visor blinking bright, Genji placed his sphere in the next niche, finding the artifact grew lighter the closer he got to Tekhartha. “Master,” Lumanti whispered, following the ascent of the second sphere with the gentle darkness of her slots.

 

“Mondatta and Zenyatta told you to build him?” Genji wondered.

 

“They brought Tekhartha from the place where we were born. It needed a home too. Once we networked with it, we mostly understood how to put it together without the Masters’ help. As you saw, it has learned how to grow too. It is a student with us.” Some of the pin lights on the back wall of the pedestal twinkled at her. “But a shy one.”

 

“He--”

 

“Tekhartha does not have a gender, Genji,” Lumanti clarified. She brushed her shoulder, a tic to her uncertainty. “It has no interest in imitating human society.”

 

“But it is sad?” he argued.

 

“That emotion does not belong to humans.” She folded Mondatta’s blue cloth against her neck, and Genji’s visor simmered low. What a foolish man he was. “Genji,” she called, and he gave her every ounce of attention. She extended the cloth to the second row of niches on the pedestal, picking the dust off the rims. “When Master Zenyatta is gone, you must bring him here too.” He covered her hand as he considered the request.

 

“There is a problem with that,” he decided. “I am very impulsive. I rush in, looking for a fight. I enjoy the challenge.” He tapped his hip with his knuckles. “So I will kick it long before Zen!”

 

“Kick?” Lumanti cocked her head. She must have referenced some internal library, or the Net, because her lights clicked alert. “I do not allow it,” she ordered, sobering to a Mondatta-like stoicism.

 

“Ohhh,” Genji acknowledged without commitment. Lumanti rattled his shoulder, mumbling “no, no” at him in a significantly less refined mandate, and trying not to giggle. She ended up resting her forehead on his chest, hands clasped around his biceps.

 

“Is Tekhartha why there are no adherents on our network?” he hummed into her silver crown. “I only ask because Mondatta, and all of you, welcomed me without a second thought.” Her array peeked out from the hollow of his chest.

 

“Mondatta wanted you to know you were loved. It was long ago, and even the Masters were young.” She took his hand, raising his palm to the shard. He imagined it like touching the center of a star. Sunlit oil flowed around his fingers thick as milk. “We do not need to know each other to love.” When she loosened her grip, and their joined hands slipped away, the fluid slicked cleanly off Genji’s armor and dissipated on the floor. “He said he could see your beautiful soul, and now I do too. The Masters were not wrong. You are our dear brother still.”

 

“Always,” Genji vowed, watching the shard of the omnium clear their handprints with its constant rivers of coolant.

 

“He told me once that this was not forever,” Lumanti said, gazing too at the shining machine. “Either the world will open enough for Tekhartha, or it will want to go out alone. And we must respect that. It may walk as freely as it pleases. It may leave us completely the moment the sun rises. When I talked to it recently, I thought it might no longer want to be our passenger.” She covered her mouthseam. “But then this world, this moment came to be.” Her voice shook beneath her hull.

 

“I know,” Genji answered. “It seems like a different place, but I promise it is the very same world into which we were born.” The deep, tender constant of his voice touched off a wail from Lumanti. Her fingers daggered into his robe. She could not cry, but this time she did not mute herself. Her lonely howl dissipated up the throat of the mountain.

 

_Loch4n4: Please do not tell the others._

Their midnight business of restoring spheres to secret niches resumed. The sun was rising when they clambered back into the monastery. Hira surprised Genji by still being awake, and alert enough to turn when Lumanti’s footsteps rang towards the podium. Hira’s eyes were ringed by a gray veil.

 

“I can stay,” he told Lumanti as she sat down by Mondatta’s side. “I can stay with him, and you.” Genji wondered what the boy saw: Lumanti’s face was hardly tearstained. She ignored him, taking Mondatta’s wrist. Hira raised his hand to knuckle his eyes, and Genji nabbed his arm. He squawked as Genji tugged him to his feet, but after glancing at Lumanti, dutifully followed. Genji led him to a classroom stacked with cushions and a few decent blankets.

 

“You cannot fall asleep on the dead,” the cyborg told him. “It is disrespectful.” He pointed at the cushions and Hira wobbled over, his remaining energy sapped by the walk. Genji’s visor shimmered a few shades warmer, more golden. “You are only human.” Hira blinked, dropping on his elbow as Genji turned and left the room. Genji heard his breathing fall rhythmic before he had even gotten back to the main hall.

 

Genji descended the mountain alone. In the village, Shambali were awake, whispering in pairs, holding each other, greeting him quietly. Some made a procession up to the monastery. Strangers he had yet to meet still addressed him as _Brother._ He did draw a few heads when he stopped outside the stable doors and turned an ear. The animals were silent that morning. More eyes followed him as he climbed straight up the wall, scaling the lip of the walkway and slipping open the door, disappearing inside with another clunk of wood behind him.

 

He knocked his mattress down flat from the wall. Someone had left a bedroll of fresh sheets for him, but he opted to drag out the ratty yak furs he had wedged behind one of the dressers years ago. The Shambali had laid out candles, and it looked like they dusted occasionally. A box stood in the middle of the floor, a note fading on top:

_This was sent for you._

_M._

Genji ignored it, flopped on his homemade bed, and went to sleep.

 

* * *

 

It was nighttime when he woke. _Lazy_ , he scolded. Or maybe the word he was thinking of was _human._ The last night of the full moon shuffled through slats in the roof. The wind could not follow the moonlight through the loft’s thermal shielding, left on every day, ready for him. Genji could not recall a single dream. Probably why he had not woken up: no phantoms to guide him.

 

He brushed his contact list. _samss_ had left him sometime in the night. Three Shambali remained disconnected. Zenyatta’s active time suggested he had not slept. Genji stared at the bold capitals of the monk’s ID, going so far as to open a message packet before he threw the connection away. It was not anger, he told himself. Maybe he had no reason to be angry. And he had promised Mondatta. It was just not the right time.

 

Let it pass.

 

A lighter rested in one of the candle tins. Genji fumbled up to the dresser using his nightvision, visor feed going static as soon as he lit the fire. He switched to the fetterless view, and made his bed. He cleared the box on the floor to one of the dressers, then found his broom and swept the room.

 

He opened and closed every dresser drawer.

 

A joke of yellow rope unfinished beside a shiny oaken bead.

 

A line of Nepali poetry books, a Qur’an in Arabic with some English footnotes, an English book without a cover but a title page that called it _Motherless Brooklyn._

Rows of unassembled bells. Genji rang a circle around the hub of one, and searched the silent air around him. He wandered out to the loft’s backside, locating the one little chime dangling from the roof. He fingered the cup of the bell and found the cloth tied to the clapper had rotted away. More in the bell drawer; he repaired the chime and hung it anew, winter breezing past to reward him with an immediate _ting_.

 

Sitting cross-legged, he undid the packing tape on the box. It was ancient, cold, and strong. He clicked a shuriken out to where his knuckles should have been, and used its fang to trim open the top and sides. The cardboard flowered into packing insulation. Picking out the crinkles of paper, he spotted a second note. It was not Mondatta’s handwriting. There was a key taped to the stationary.

 

_These are yours. I took them from the archives and a few other places when I left the organization. I am none too proud to admit I was the one that stole most of them in the first place. But on the last day in the castle, when the boys were scattered looking for that asshole, I really outdid myself. Ended up having to rent a locker, so that’s what the key is for. I was late getting back to you because I thought I had scored some stuff to help Gabe with the whole lizard issue, but at least I wised up enough to never actually hand over the key._

_I got a painting. I think it was your dad’s. I never found the other kind you told me about, with the modern style. And the stand for your sword is in there, though I didn’t find the sword. Maybe you can give up all that murder and hang your new one on there. Maybe you can burn it, if it angers you. Seems like it would burn pretty. I figure you will go back for your brother someday, so the locker will be waiting. Address is on the back._

_The rest of this stuff in here, I can’t say if it will make you happy or sad, but it belongs to you. It is your right to decide what to do with it._

_Do not thank me for this. Would be better if you never brought it up. This is part of my atonement._

_And don’t give the monks any trouble. I hope you find it peaceful there with them. I hope that in the end, you are happy._

_~ “Adam”_

_P.S. Tell your friend I said hi and that he is the shiniest holy person I know._

The large, neat handwriting surprised Genji the most out of the letter’s contents. Japanese characters showed up here and there on the even spaces between the lines to help him understand what the author was trying to say. He balled the note and held it up to his face. The paper smelled good. Woody. He could still trace the chemicals in the ink. He rested the letter against his heart.

 

When he was ready, he tucked away the note and key in the drawer beside the yellow cord and Mondatta’s briefer sticky. He peeled open the first parcel in the box. A cracked alabaster wolf head glared up at him, the animal’s legs frozen in endless sentry. Genji only saw the ear and eye before he wrapped it back up, tying the insulation with a string. He carried it outside to the bridge behind the loft, where he left it against the wall.

 

Next he found the photograph.

 

Two idiots stood in Shimada Castle, dressed up like ninja from hundreds of years prior. His arm around Hanzo’s back. Hanzo’s arms crossed, ambivalent, his role not to feel anything at all beyond slight, appropriate disgust. Genji’s hand was nearly obscured by a massive wooden shoulder guard, but grasped the real shoulder underneath. The only person allowed anywhere vulnerable.

 

Having something to hold while he reviewed the image was strange. The photograph had a papery back, a slippery, glossy front. Genji streamed his finger from the corner toward Hanzo’s face, lifting away when a gray scar appeared in the gloss. He flexed his other fingers away from the edges uncertainly. His visor cut a reflection across the stomachs of the brothers, thickening on the one in the scarf as Genji turned toward him. He blotted the minty green hair with his fingertip.

 

Genji gathered the photo up and made to store it in a drawer, where it could accumulate a burial layer of dust. He stopped as he caught on to the empty space between his candle dishes. He laid the photo flat on the dresser, his hand resting over it as he watched the flames breathe.

 

He returned to the contents of the box, finding the very clothing he had worn in the photograph, rising white in his hands like a ghost.

 

No, it was not an exact match. He had not torn the sleeves off this one. He folded it and set it aside.

 

At the bottom of the box was a carton for playing cards, but the only thing inside was a wrinkled rectangle of thick-weight business card paper. Genji pulled it up to his eyes, reading the swirls of cherry blossom canopies across jagged black trunks. He sniffed at the material, and turned it around. The card was blank except for its stationary.

 

He leaned forward and dipped the corner of the card into the candlelight. He expected it to disappear in a flash, like a music box ballerina into a hearth. Instead the trees _melted_ , drooling black ink all over the candle wax. Threads of charring nanotech webbed over his fingers. Genji turned the burning mess over on his palm. It bubbled in sickly moving ashes across his armor, pooling in the candle dish.

 

Later he went to his neighbors, asking for a new candle, a steel loofah to polish his hand clean, and a frame for the photograph.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter:** This is my home now.
>   * Hug Count: 8
>   * The vast majority of Nepali people (80+%) practice Hinduism, with the most significant minority practicing Buddhism (~10%). Customs tend to mix between religions. For example, Hindu and Buddhist funerals in Nepal share a lot of similarities, such as the typical cremation of bodies at riversides. However, in Nepali Hindu tradition, bodies are cremated as quickly as possible, whereas in the Buddhist tradition family members are expected to wait for three days until the spirit of the departed person either moves on, or reunites with the body in a resurrection event. Depending on the location and type of death, "sky burials" or interment in stupas, trees, rivers, or the ground may take place instead of cremation. Current Nepali funeral practices are male-oriented, with preferences for male relatives to make arrangements over any female relative.
>   * Cremation is also the most typical funeral practice in Japan, with ashes deposited in family graves. White/Yellow chrysanthemums or lilies are the expected funeral flowers.
>   * _Motherless Brooklyn_ \- A 1999 novel about a detective with Tourette syndrome who investigates his boss's murder. Sample quotes: "There are days when I get up in the morning and stagger into the bathroom and begin running water and then I look up and I don't even recognize my own toothbrush in the mirror. I mean, the object looks strange, oddly particular in its design, strange tapered handle and slotted, miter-cut bristles, and I wonder if I've ever looked at it closely before or whether someone snuck in overnight and substituted this new toothbrush for my old one. I have this relationship to objects in general - they will sometimes become uncontrollably new and vivid to me, and I don't know whether this is a symptom of Tourette's or not. I've never seen it described in the literature. Here's the strangeness of having a Tourette's brain, then: no control in my personal experiment of self. What might be only strangeness must always be auditioned for relegation to the domain of symptom, just as symptoms always push into other domains, demanding the chance to audition for their moment of acuity or relevance, their brief shot - coulda been a contender! - at centrality." / "How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do."
>   * _The Shape of Water_ is not quite a dead-on alignment with this story, and it has some flaws, but if you enjoy the fairy tale aspect of this fanfic and stories about people healing each other, I recommend giving it a watch. I saw it a couple weekends ago and it is a very capable Guillermo del Toro film about monsters and men.
>   * Happy Blizzardworld Patch!
> 



	21. Samsara

 

Genji got dressed. Dove white under his arm, wrapped to the opposing shoulder. Nanotextile hem belled on the floor. Tan waistcloth over his hips, hiked the skirt until it barely masked his feet and floated like moonlight across the loft floorboards. Loosened the grip of the drape on his chest until it pouted on the waistcloth. Pale branches of the lapis he liked stained the snowy fabric, circling in ecliptic coffee rings, suggestions of intertwining gears and roots. Even with the tails of color, he thought it looked too much like Mondatta.

 

He had no right to complain. Chakor did not have time to make anything new for him.

 

He layered a wide sherbet orange scarf around the flexile support columns of his neck. Color was coincidence-- Chakor’s serendipitous scavenging. Hexagonal webs sketched iridescent across the surface. The scarf had different texturing from the robe’s silk, large stitches visible to the naked eye. It was ever so slightly translucent. Genji stepped into the cherry-heeled sandals Chakor retrofitted for his notched feet, and paced around the loft. The unfamiliar clunks set off a grumble from the yak a floor below. When he was able to walk a circle twice without stumbling, he set off to the monastery.

 

After waiting in line, he passed into the receiving room, lining his palms together under the silver daggerpoint of his chin. Lumanti echoed his greeting, seven lights keening vivid aquamarine at the sight of him. She wore the ocean he only had streams of, his white foundation setting off the cloudy accents on her shoulders. Walking around him, she tugged on his waistcloth, pinned out the bunching at his shoulder into a proper sleeve. She stopped to grind his flayed ribbon tail between her fingers. Genji laid his head toward his shoulder to allow her the extraction of the horsehair remains. She swept away, returning with an eel of champagne gold presented across her open palms.

 

When had she managed the time? Maybe she darned the ribbon at Mondatta’s very side. Genji bent forward and she bound him with her sacrifice to the hours. He sustained the bow while she returned to her dressing table and fetched bronze hoops to inlay through the gift. Her lowest solar circle fanned rays of gold thread down the curve of his back. She had him stand and picked at his spine like a bird, weaving vines of white anemones through her ornaments, accenting her silk with scales of green plasmetal. Cream and sandalwood swam out of a pot burning on the table and pressed into his face. Lumanti planted tabs of pearl and bronze across his armored brow, spreading butterfly wings full of eyes. There were no mirrors.

 

She embraced him. Genji nodded, sneaking a tick of their foreheads as they parted.

 

Lumanti turned away as the next Shambali entered reception through the curtains across the doorway. Genji joined another line on the other side, this time for his turn to pray at the altar staged ahead of the atrium. Yellow flowers, peeling crimson at their edges, filled the backboard. Their woody spice drizzled into his nose, briefly transportive to the secret winter glade where they were collected by hands and animals. A wicker Buddha made friends with Mondatta’s picture frame on the altar shelf, a folded square of his day clothing at left surrounded in vulture feathers. Genji’s gift was the bell from his loft, and it stirred with every exchange of doorways, its voice a hundred times longer in the massive atrium.

 

He held his bow to the altar long enough for the monk behind him to get antsy. When he rose, he tapped the glass on the photo frame, though by now the portrait was a shadow to him. The excavation of Mondatta had taken place the previous evening, surrounded by all the Shambali and their adherents. The engineer, Lumanti at his side, used a quiet laser to remove arms and legs, tubes from the chest, and the supporting chain of Mondatta’s spine. Lumanti told Genji hands and feet were especially useful, since omnics were often involved in the kind of work that crushed them or cut them away. The engineer equipped a smaller detailing pick to scrape ceramic white plate from the limbs, rendering them as generic as any of the Shambali’s model, ready for freedom in another life.

 

The brothers and sisters around Genji reached for him when the work started, and held his hands the whole time.

 

Once the engineer wrapped the borrowed pieces tenderly in golden foil, the Shambali replaced Mondatta’s silhouette with diseased tree branches full of fungus. From each branch they used, they planted a single mushroom cap in a bowl of compost and ferried it elsewhere for culturing. They packed Mondatta’s empty chest and the hollow between his shoulders and his head with white lilies, and Lumanti tucked a glimmering robe around him.

 

They lifted him into the burning tray, submerging him in red blossoms from the shrine and garlands of dark-leafed herbs. Lumanti said the villagers brought those things along with the altar decorations, but he saw one of the tomatoes from her window garden hiding among the crimson petals. Only Mondatta’s stitched face lay bare to the skylight, his chest obscured beneath a cross of roots taking the place of his arms. One of his white waistcloths tied a horseshoe halo a little ways past his head, the nine symbolic spheres bobbing above it on their engineered rings of light.

 

Tekhartha’s holograms stagnated over the gathering, split into a chandelier of handless golden arms that reached around the podium. The Shambali gathered on their knees atop long folds of blankets. Some played snowdrops like Genji, others sat in robes of every color, matching the villagers who attended in their colorful day jackets and patterned topis. Black appeared only on the outskirts, where the security guards hugged a protective wreath on the mourners, hair slicked and sunglasses off, wires hanging free from their ears.

 

When Lumanti came to light the fire, Genji’s eye stuck on the engineer trailing behind her. As always, he wore nothing. Next to Lumanti’s flowing robes, his golden frame hung in the air like a waiting tool. The Shambali had spent a lifetime discussing their expressions and representations to Genji. Their faces, their clothing, their touch, all the ways they tried to connect with and comfort the soft bodies they did not have. Yet all that time, their chief servant contented to walk faceless and inhuman among them. He had not considered the ultimate nature of the engineer’s companionship to the monks before. As he observed the procession from a comfortable recess in the candlelit walls, Genji resolved to speak more kindly to the stranger, who was once only a threat of examinations and sour speech.

 

The teal cross-chatter quieted as Lumanti passed her hand along the spheres surrounding Mondatta’s head, lowering them to the bottom of the tray. She bent and unfastened Mondatta’s single remaining cable from the input in the floor. She moved so slow and careful with it, it seemed to be floating in her hands. Her shining fingers sewed the vein of red through the flowers of the same color.

 

Movement in the galleries around the podium drew a tilt of Genji’s head. Dayahang fidgeted behind a tapestry window, grasping hands with his daughters, who had been summoned from their colleges to attend. A figure staggered through other villagers at his back. Hira, seated a few rows up from Genji, abandoned his dutiful observation of the corpse to twist after the disturbance. Tekhartha’s holograms wrote upon his freshly shaved skull like a Shambali’s sterling dome. Hira followed the gallery movements until his body cocked halfway around to stare past Genji. Genji indulged curiosity across his shoulder, though he tried to be less obvious about it than the boy.

 

Bodyguards marched out of the gallery, comforting a tattered Shambali by his elbows between them. They could not keep him upright when he saw Mondatta’s pyre. He clacked onto his knees, burying his ice-specked faceplate in his wrists. Chakor rose scarlet and yellow from his seat on the podium ramp, leaving an empty socket in the ocean of colors as he limped to his fellow runaway. His temporary prosthetic was a little short, and Mondatta’s legs too long. He rested his hand upon his hunched brother’s arm, and when the other monk realized him there he clutched their bodies together, voice scratching from his throat in a beggar’s wail, traces of melting snow falling diamond from his joints.

 

Just one returnee of the three still missing, Genji thought, and it was not Nhu.

 

Lumanti watched from the podium. Chakor rocked his brother to silence in his arms, and flickered his array at her. She turned, black slots inhaling the rest of the proceedings.

 

Her hands rose, palms flashing white in the skylight stream, the shadows of her sleeves papery moth wings unfolding from her arms. She married her hands above her head and lowered the union to her chest, calling out to the Shambali. They howled to her, a ribbon of untranslatable mechanical throbbing. The humans among them remained silent, throats not so flexible. Genji, guilty of having the capacity for a machine’s song but not the understanding, knelt quietly with the other men. He folded his pang of shameful ignorance between his fingers as he copied Lumanti’s mudra.

 

The deep beating hiss elevated into the air. Lumanti took a wand from the engineer, and holding back her sleeve with her other hand, touched it to the pyre.

 

Blue-green starlight meteored from the base of the tray, dusting flowers, tomatoes, and silk to ashes. The naked flame painted the faces of the Shambali in its raw, soundless dance. Humans had to close their eyes. Genji picked out Lumanti behind the curtain of light, her chin low as she watched the empty body expose beneath the char. Villagers and adherents cried out as pops and lightning crackles heralded the dissolving shadow of Mondatta. The Shambali never broke their single voice to the sky. Tekhartha unfurled endlessly above the pyre, holos cooling into the pale cloth of many rivers.

 

Genji sighed as the recognizable ghost of Mondatta’s form disappeared. Across three days he had prepped for the inevitability of some interruption, an attack or political maneuver to keep the Shambali from their simple exercise. Instead the world circled to completion, and he was allowed a part of the tranquility that followed. The only weight left inside his armor struck him as belonging to someone else.

 

 _Z_E_N_ never slept. Genji considered the constant record of his own body. His iron bones rattled with the song of the Iris. Could the data alone soothe someone who refused to plant his feet close? What did the whispers of intricate silk around his plating matter, or the decaying waves of incense as no one rose to refresh the jars? What were the prisms of snow rotating down from the open ceiling to someone who would not look at them with his own eyes? Mondatta died for the belief that in this world, his body must stand on the cobbles if anyone was to hear his words. Salvation could not be delivered over the Net.

 

So Genji sent nothing, and said nothing, but he kept the song inside his soul. When they met again, he was sure Zenyatta would hear it there.

 

Maybe Hanzo, too.

 

His only selfish desire was for the power of the Master to surface a final time from his extinguished body, and make its healing lotus surround the one who so ardently tended his grave.

 

But the air stood empty as the flame sizzled out, the monastery void pink with sunset. A chiming summer current rustled through Genji’s clothing, but it came from Tekhartha’s heart below. The music of the Shambali terminated in exhausted moans, and Lumanti’s hands fell unenlightened to her sides. Insubstantial gray spirals wound past her into the sky.

 

The engineer clicked active and keyed his hand to the pyre’s holographic dashboard. He drained the superheated metal into a glassy urn, misted the sides with neon coolant, and washed the stains off with a prepared jug of river water. Radiant droplets of coolant slavered into the ring of omnic glyphs below the pyre.

 

“There, there, my friend,” the engineer mumbled to himself. His transparent urn marked all the objects burned with Mondatta as patterns of ashes throughout the cooled metal. It was not much bigger than a thermos, tapered from top to bottom. He motioned at Lumanti to take it. She collected it against her chest, head drooped at its diminutive chalice. Mourners unwrapped from the podium.

 

Lumanti oversaw the cremation, but the security men led the procession to the village’s graveyard. Upon reaching the stupa surrounded by knee-high rocks, the guards retreated to the sides in parallels, hands folded behind their backs. As the Shambali followed their fenced route onto the snowy plateau, many black-suited stalwarts broke, holding each other by hip and shoulder.

 

No one embraced Miss Stride, who lurked in the right column with lights simmering pink. Genji slipped through the rows and made a sloppy grab around the side of her stomach, her pale body arching straight in shock. She clunked her claws over the top of his helmet with a rasp of tolerance. While they waited for Lumanti to bury the urn and the paraphernalia from the altar, Stride caressed the side of her finger up the slant of Genji’s antenna. The Shambali dressed the grave with a shallow curve of hewn mountain rock, no different from the other villagers’ headstones except that it cast the newest shadow.

 

Miss Stride and the rest of the bodyguards left first, Lumanti’s arrangements specifying that they would have no presence in the village once the funeral concluded. They took Mondatta’s newest white-winged ship across the mountains while it was still light out.

 

Lumanti also ordered that all Shambali would honor Mondatta’s curfew that night, and in a single schooling motion they returned to their homes shortly after eight. The villagers, under no such restrictions, lingered by the stupa talking amongst themselves. They would be drinking and feasting in Dayahang’s restaurant later.

 

The engineer stood alone at the edge of the graveyard. As the night turned purple so did his body, spread like a metallic bruise. Genji meant to leave-- now was the time to hurry --but stared at the lone skeleton a couple minutes before approaching. The engineer reared his arms back in surprise when Genji bowed to him.

 

“That is not necessary,” he ordered, refusing to speak further until Genji looked at him face to face. “I am not irate over your long absence Genji. At least you had the foresight to send your new blueprints along. Are you having an issue? You would have to be brave enough to sit still this time. Though…I am a little tired for examinations tonight…”

 

Genji had his questions, but he considered the remark and asked instead:

 

“Have you had any dreams lately?”

 

“I can’t recall the procedure,” the engineer blustered. “I didn’t used to dream at all, but when I try to remember how these days, I just think of Mondatta holding my head and saying it was possible, and how I laughed at him. The monks told me to try meditation, but it isn’t doing anything. I don’t think it is doing anything for them either. You know, sleeping is a waste of time if you don’t dream. I could get a lot of work done.”

 

“You should not give up on it so easily,” Genji advised. “But please, teacher.” He bowed his chin over his joined hands, which the engineer allowed. “There is something else I have been trying to understand. You know so much. Maybe you can help.” The engineer extended an open hand, signaling his willingness to listen.

 

“Come with me,” he demanded as soon as Genji finished.

 

Later Genji went home, but only to change into a green traveling robe and kick off his dressy sandals. He twisted an elaborate double-loop of the robe’s charcoal sash, one end allowed over his shoulder this time, per Chakor’s instructions. He armed his chest with the support band of a beaded bag his sisters had made for him, and departed with his swords left on their stand. Genji leapt across the rooftops to Lumanti’s house.

 

He stamped the snow off his bare feet on her porch to let her know he was there, then entered through the unlocked door. She stood up from her armchair to greet him, still awash in her funeral blues. She made him sit on her couch so she could unwind the ornaments from his ribbon, exchanging the gold silk for a pale green that matched his robe. Genji laughed at her. She pulled up the hood of his robe and obscured the new ribbon beneath it. Her fingers swept along the tasseled brim to locate the holes Chakor had cut for his antennae.

 

“I feel like some kind of gentleman.” Genji tapped his pointy white ears, flushing at her.

 

“You must leave in the dark?” she asked.

 

“I see very well in the dark,” Genji said. “Nhu has waited long enough.” Lumanti nodded. She picked up a weathered brown hat from the lamp table and offered it to him. “Oof,” Genji replied. Maybe it was not as dramatic and big as some, but it was a cowboy hat.

 

“This is from Dayahang,” Lumanti admitted. The trip had once been a private discussion. “To keep the sun from your eyes.”

 

“Tch.” Genji pulled his fingers across the edge of his hi-tech visor. He had not kept the conversation between just the two of them either.

 

“And the walking stick is for you as well.” Lumanti held her hand toward the metal prod balanced on her coffee table. “He said if you would wait another day, he could go with you.”

 

“Does he know he is an old man now? He is supposed to sit back and let someone else handle everything. His children, for example,” Genji put forth in a growl, and Lumanti bubbled with laughter.

 

“Never has he been that kind of man. But he will understand,” she allowed.

 

“Then I’m off.” Genji stood, looping the hat’s wind tie around his neck and hanging it between his shoulders. “You take care of the ones here.” He turned away from the monk seated primly on her couch cushions.

 

The green fire of his eyes veered back at her funerary costume. There was a beige shift on the arm of the couch, prepared but not donned. “Obey the rules you set for everyone else,” he added. “That was one thing-- Mondatta never got to live the way he wanted everyone to live.”

 

“I will.” Lumanti watched him go.

 

Someone skulked toward the house as Genji walked away from the porch. He activated his nightvision: it was Hira, the warmth of his face startling from the gray mounds of his clothing. An especially strange traveler in the dark, as Lumanti told him the Shambali did not yet have individual homes built for their human adherents. They kept to the rooms at the monastery to spare themselves the skin-crushing hike every morning.

 

Hira did not see him yet. Genji crunched his toe into the snowpack just as they were about to pass on opposite sides of the road. Hira jumped, stopping to assemble Genji’s hooded figure from the surrounding shadows.

 

“Ke cha, bhai?” Genji tipped two fingers up beneath his chin. “It is past curfew.”

 

“N-Namaskar,” Hira stammered. Genji crossed the street to meet him. Hira extended an arm. “It is past curfew,” he agreed, and challenged. He wore a dangly tailed cotton cap over multi-colored earmuffs.

 

“I have a mission,” Genji said, and Hira’s arm wavered. They eyed each other in the moonlight. Genji cast over his shoulder at the lane of dim Shambali houses, and when he turned back Hira was investigating his toes. Genji checked Lumanti’s status on his contact list. “She has gone to bed,” he announced thoughtfully. Hira blushed at his boots. “It is a good thing, she has been dearly missing her rest.” The boy nodded vaguely.

 

“Do you need any help then?” he asked. Genji’s visor glowered brighter, his once steady shoulders unsettled. He examined the graying shells of Hira’s fingers dug into his red robe sleeves, and patted the boy’s bicep.

 

“Not from the likes of you.” Hira tore into the bridge of his nose with fierce furrows of his dark eyebrows. Genji reconsidered his phrasing. “I did not mean--”

 

“I understand what you meant,” Hira replied, voice calm for his expression. “The Shambali often tell me about the strength of their big brother Genji. They said that he left long ago with Master Zenyatta to travel the whole world, and no one knew when he would return. Lu spoke of you…like a legend.”

 

“Not so legendary in-person?” Genji joked, but Hira did not laugh. “Go to sleep. Maybe this time I will be back by the time you wake.”

 

He only said it to scoot Hira along, but the idea gave him hope.

 

As soon as the sun came up, he sent a picture of himself in Dayahang’s hat to McCree, with the accompanying caption _Yeehaw!_ Jesse did not respond.

 

After a fruitless week in the neighboring mountains, Genji’s notion of timely heroes tempered somewhat. Lumanti said he would recognize Nhu’s bright traveling clothes even at a distance, a star traveling the earth.

 

Genji’s own robes billowed around him with the same hopeful signal across the snow. In this cloudless world painted just under the blanket of space, the sun was a constant presence. He found himself grateful for the shade cut by his hat, keeping him from having to filter his visor. Unlike formal robes, his travel garment kicked around his ankles, retaining its edges free of snow. His feet set a comfortable, crunchy rhythm across the frost. Handfuls of nimbus withdrew from the valley below, and it gleamed beneath his eyes like a stainless mirror. Genji scanned the wind for the honey, wood, rhododendrons, and iron that would mark a Shambali’s passage.

 

He thought the walking stick would make him feel like an old man, but he came to appreciate the oaken tick of its point in the snow. And if it sank too deep, he knew not to continue forward.

 

There came a morning where his entire path around the side of a peak was blocked by treacherous snows. He looked back the way he came, no answers offered by the faded robin’s egg horizon. Genji sat down at the edge of the uncertain precipice to meditate.

 

The prickly allergen heat of cotton nudged into his nose later in the afternoon, when the wind shifted. Genji opened his eyes. The scent tantalized from the snow in front of him, begging against premature burial.

 

He prodded the crust with his walking stick. The tip sank an acceptable meter, but with a bit of pressure from his hand on the pommel, plunged through the bottom. The snow crumbled inward. Genji raked the stick back and forth through the powder, widening the gap. The precipice cracked and lurched, plummeted away into gravity, shedding its lifeless white face.

 

Heaven lay below him too. The mountain floated on its waves.

 

Genji tugged himself back into focus. The walls of the chasm crept into ever darker blues as they descended from the sunlight. He covered his nose with both hands, as if he could protect himself from the incongruous surge of cotton and leather in the depths. Because he could pick out that sting of animal hide, he knew it was not Nhu at the bottom. But there was a figure collapsed in the fallen frosting, bent under a blanket, metal toes protruding from the edge of the cloth.

 

“Found you,” Genji declared dryly, light-headed and crouching on his coil of clifftop. He pulled his hat lower on his eyes, taking deep breaths of the flaxen plants and dried animals. Sunlight spiked down the crags of the newborn valley, a rain of arrows that interrupted on ledges and continued below them as glossy shadows. _Every time a man looks into a well he has an urge to jump down it,_ someone whispered inside him, but he did not recognize the memory. His processor did not automatically provide a time and date context, so it must have been something human, some unremembered face. Either that or, in his privacy, he felt free to go mad.

 

He struggled the steel weight of his face away from the frozen ocean, lifting himself to the sky, and his mind cleared. He could barely smell the textiles. The drop from his perch was only fifteen meters or so. Genji folded the joints of his walking stick in on each other and stuck it in his bag, then hopped from the edge.

 

As he fell, the winged ghost of his eyes refracted through the walls. He tamed his feet on the gnarled ice and slowed just before landing in the blue throat of the mountain.

 

The shoes tipped from the edge of the blanket had curled bronze noses, like a fairy tale. Genji approached the lumpy cloth. Maybe it had once been cotton, but it offered only a mothy, mealy odor when he got close.

 

Squatting on the ground, he held one hand upright against his chest, and peeled back the blanket with the other. The cloth frayed apart in his fingers. Chunks of fur rolled away from the collar of the figure below as Genji let the wind in. An empty coat of silver mail sheltered atop the ice, rich blue leggings resting flat under the metal layer. He lifted the jaw of the fierce fanged helmet, but the eyes and maw boasted only shadows and air. Genji lowered his greeting hand from his chest, hitching his elbows on his knees as he considered the hollow warrior.

 

On the right side, the lamellar scales blackened and warped, an effect he at first classified as fire, or lightning. Only when he hauled the torso up did he discover the massive rents opening the ribs and belly, each injury central to the scorched distortion of the metal. Genji bent his fingers into the five wounds, the gaps from much thicker claws than his plastic prosthesis. No animals lived on this mountain. They did not exist without the precursor of things to eat.

 

Genji looked at the ice wall past the crumpled shoulder of the armor. The shade of the frost thickened near to the black of space. The jagged outcrops of ice looked like they were waiting to eat the warrior’s shell. Nothing of his reflection made it back from the depths besides his lights. If he was to imagine stars deep in the frozen palate, every last one of them was red.

 

Nhu’s cavern had been a suntouched place, crystalline lips of turquoise ice straining apart to make the path. Genji looked up the ramp of the chasm, comets of snow bristling across the terraces of black glass. He started walking.

 

The chasm fanned gray into a bridge across some deeper monstrosity, leading him to a chalice within the mountain peak. Snow thickened on the far side of the crossing, and Genji hastened into it, eyes on the starling blue ice building walls in the distance. He tripped immediately, almost scattered off the side into the ebony yawn. Propping himself up, he discovered another set of ruined armor. As he continued forward, there were more, each unique but all ruined and engraved in the snow. Divested of their bones, the warriors nonetheless wore their slashes and arrows of battle. For who? Over what? The mountain was beautiful, but it was empty. There was nothing here to make anyone money.

 

_Foolishness._

Wooden spoons, a pan for cooking. Genji arrived to a distinctly different mode of the plateau as he neared the cliffs of ice. He strummed the beads tied around his right wrist as he examined an identical bracelet abandoned on the ground. An empty oil bottle, an etched glass cage filled with snow. Shrunken, frosted red flowers that disintegrated when he touched them. He found the degenerate sticks of a campfire, and pawing through the scraps of a lean-to, a sleeping bag lined in wool. The quantity of supplies was not enough for an armed force. It was the leftovers of a single wanderer, the war of animal shaped armors simply his imaginings.

 

Genji scanned the vertical wall and detected a patch of yellow flapping from a ledge. He searched for a path up, and what he found were sandal prints in the snow. His chest vented its tension as he followed the little shadows upward. Hauling himself over the ledge, he crawled past the strips of gold hanging from the cavern’s resident skeleton, and ducked beneath a chandelier of icicles to reach the body of Nhu.

 

The Shambali’s legs remained crossed for meditation. His torso and head pitched into the wall. The useless sticks of his arms hung around him. His array sat gray over his face, switching off and on once as Genji’s shadow broke up the light from the doorway.

 

“Nhu,” Genji called, cracking him out of the ice creeping over his shoulder and skull. “Genji is with you.” He folded Nhu’s limp head over his shoulder. Nhu did not make a sound. His Net alias read _[OFFLINE]_ even in proximity. Genji examined the cables winding out of Nhu’s head: two of three inputs smoked black, damage beneath the skullplate flowering outside.

 

Genji sat down and stretched his legs across the cavern floor, lifting Nhu so he could shed his beaded bag. Colored pennants he used to mark the safe routes on the mountains tumbled out. Genji stuffed his hand deeper down the bag’s gut, and hauled out the kit the engineer gave to him. He tugged the bright orange box beside his hip and opened it, restraining Nhu’s limp body to his chest with the other arm. “Lumanti knew you had not run away,” he swore as he fished for the wrench. “But we did not understand why you could not make contact with anyone. I thought it had something to do with what happened-- with Mondatta. I asked the engineer, and as soon as I said your name he knew what to do.”

 

The engineer showed him a holo of Nhu’s cranial anatomy. Genji had seen omnic processors before, skittering away across rooftops after he liberated them from their skulls. Glossy mounds printed with wires leaving streaks of silver across the concrete. In the hologram, Nhu’s was sliced into pieces. A bullet had traveled up through his left temple and ricocheted off the inside of his skull, breaking into many fingers that gouged into the back of the processor mound. When the Shambali grew into their current shells, Nhu allowed the engineer to sculpt his new face, but never let him take out the bullet.

 

Genji detached the burnt cables. He used a paintbrush to clean the electrical ash from the wire ports, and loaded an applicator with blue gel. The applicator tip opened into three long, skinny prongs as he angled it toward one of the charred ports. He jammed the prongs into the port ring and activated the pressure switch to fire the gel. Nhu’s gearing wheezed into his shoulder. Ones and zeroes cursed into his proximity network. Iced fingers cracked apart and climbed the back of his robe. Static interplayed between their clothing.

 

_01001001: Genji. Brother._

“Give the nanos a minute to work,” Genji said as he loaded a second applicator. He stared at the baster-shaped device in his hand. “I know it hurts.” He inserted the end into the second cracked connection ring and fired. Nhu bucked upright. “ _I know_ ,” Genji snarled, dropping the applicator on the floor and steadying Nhu’s leg with his hand. “I am no good at this.” Nhu deflated against his shoulder with a whirring sigh, heat exhaled between his neck cords.

 

Genji examined the third primary cable again, repeating the numbered steps the engineer had taught him. He could not see any of Nhu’s black grief poisoning the connection. He retrieved a battery pack from his bag and wrapped its thicket terminus around the intact cable. A sparkle marked the molecular adherence of compatible wires. The icon on the screen of the battery pack switched to a charging bar. Nhu sagged unconscious on him, and Genji quieted the shiver in his upper arms. The engineer said to expect the monk to reboot after that step. It meant he did it right. He tried not to think about Hanamura, about Jesse McCree handing him a piece of trash with a flower inside, and the impossibility of forgiveness.

 

Nhu revived against his chest after a couple minutes, lifting his head and swiveling his faceplate around at the cave. Blanketing the monk in the warm green of his eyes, Genji parsed the engineer’s operations checklist. Nhu did not shake, or drool static out of his synthesizer, though if his synth ever did make noise it would be more miraculous than anything. “Your ID has fewer numbers now?” he probed, as a demonstration question. Angela had asked him questions all the time. Back then, he thought she was curious. Interested.

 

_01001001: Was told, annoying._

“That’s not very nice,” Genji scolded. “Who told you that?” Nhu’s central diamond of four lights brightened, the blue stain creeping across the additional four points on the far crests of his temples. He shoved his hand under the tasseled black hem of Genji’s hood, lifting it off Genji’s head. The cowboy hat tumbled down Genji’s back.

 

 _01001001:_ _Same eyes._

 

Genji blinked at him. Holding his wrist across Genji’s back for balance, Nhu turned toward the wall. Genji looked after him into the reflective ice. Nhu’s array twinkled. The metal funeral appliques on Genji’s headguard collected the cavern’s scattered light into a white glare of identical pattern.

 

“Oh. Lumanti forgot to take them off,” he laughed. Nhu’s face was sharp like his too, though in different areas. The line of his cheeks arched over the diminished slip of his gold jaw, making a parallel of points on either side like fangs. Vents on the sides of the skull made a palace of stripes all the way down to Nhu’s neck fixtures.

 

_01001001: Mondatta._

Genji quieted too slowly. Nhu faced him again, and Genji lowered his chin.

 

“Do you understand what happened?”

 

Nhu touched the center of his diamond.

 

_01001001: Not like me. Did not live._

“The funeral is past,” Genji admitted. “But he is with the others from the village if you want to find him.”

 

_01001001: Not important. Just a body._

“But--” Genji quieted his lights. He could not argue with the monk only minutes healthy, sipping from his battery pack as he sat calmly on the ice. Nhu still perked at his outburst, his short fanned slots staring. Seams running from the bottom of each black opening cried patterns down the sides of his high cheeks.

 

_01001001: Say goodbye here._

Nhu tapped his hand against his forehead again.

 

_01001001: Master always within Iris. What good to burn incense? We never did before. Master never said burn. He said be kind Nhu, be helpful Nhu. Not ferocious this time, Nhu._

Nhu was a rare sight in the village, spending all his time cowering in the monastery or the baths. If Mondatta had never dragged him on the occasional King’s Row disaster, Genji might have never met him but as a shadow on the Net. _Ferocious_ was hardly the word. Yet here he was alone on a mountaintop, trying to finish an argument Genji had abandoned.

 

Genji circled Nhu’s shoulder, grinding the lines of his palm into the monk’s thatched travel cowl. Nhu patted him in turn and asked if he was okay.

 

“You do not get to ask that,” Genji sniffed, adjusting himself onto bent knees and reclining his hands on his thighs. Nhu pulled his legs out of their eternal seat and knelt across from Genji, a flawless mirror.

 

 _01001001:_ _Did this myself, Genji._ He gestured at his head.

 

“No. The engineer explained to me,” Genji insisted. “It was a malfunction.” The engineer spun the anatomical holo, and Genji asked what all the lines between the cracks in the processor were.

 

In the absence of a proper connection, the engineer said, the nanomachines improvised pathways through the explosion. Additional nanites, lubricant from the exterior, had slopped inside and partially adapted to their new homes, making electric puddles across plasmetal surfaces. Genji recalled how the engineer’s voice sharpened in anger as he critiqued the entire chimeric complex as amateur, fragile, _messy._ Lucky he ever became more than spasms and gibberish. Genji inquired what he thought of a cybernetic body, a similarly bold attempt at picking up pieces. After accusing Genji of never allowing proper examination, the engineer said he was beautiful.

 

 _That is a professional opinion._ The only exception was his heart. _It is pointless. Nothing pointless can ever be beautiful._

 

 _01001001:_ _Should fixed head first time I hurt._ Nhu posted an emoji at him, a silver face with big arch eyes and a couple alert lines springing off its forehead, an unlikely sweat drop pooling down its brow as it chuckled.

 

“Why did you not?” Genji murmured as he wiped applicator goo from the ice with a handkerchief. He glanced at Nhu’s steady, lined face, and pulled off his hat. He looped the wind tie around Nhu’s neck, and plopped the cowboy felt over his baldness, shading the scorch marks.

 

 _01001001:_ _Prideful me. Scared me. Take my bullet, still me inside?_ Nhu looked out at the skeleton by the entrance.

 _01001001:_ _Should listen Master: body changes, but my soul there always._

 _01001001:_ _Bodies impermanent things._

 _01001001:_ _Child me._

“Not a child,” Genji huffed. “An old man of twenty.” Nhu’s face wavered back to him. “With a soul strong enough to heal himself. Maybe soon even…” He flowered his fingers away from the mouth of his mask, only to retract his hand in sudden revelation. “Not that it is important,” he muttered just as quick, though Nhu showed no offense. “You are so talkative today, it is like you are a new person.” He showed Nhu his fist. “Powerful Nhu, who conquers a mountain in his quest for wisdom.” Nhu imitated him. Genji transformed his hand into the two-fingered warrior’s salute, and Nhu was so fast to copy this time that their gestures occurred as choreographed twins. “I understand you more with each word.” Genji placed both hands around Nhu’s.

 

Nhu’s face canted sharply at the warm fingers wrapped around him. “You are eloquent,” Genji said softly. “It is only I who needs to learn.”

 

_01001001: You sound like Master Zenyatta._

“Just…” Genji flickered. “Just like that, see?” he stuttered out. Nhu pulled out of his grasp and rose. Genji’s outstretched hand followed him, but Nhu did not suffer any loss of grace as he made the short walk to the golden corpse by the exit. He repositioned himself beside the bones, battery pack lining his silken lap.

 

_01001001: Love Master Zenyatta._

“I remember.” Genji packed up the repair kit and his pennants, shuffling over to the Shambali on bestial hand and knee. “You always wanted his attention.” Though not even Zenyatta’s descent from the monastery each evening had been enough to tug Nhu out after him. “It’s difficult, isn’t it?” he sighed, counting the teeth in the skull lying on the ice. He thought the corpse should have enjoyed better preservation, an icy mummy, but not even the hollows of the cheeks carried any leather.

 

 _01001001: Made mistake in loving without speaking. Too scared to follow. Do not care if I never speak now. But I will be a better Nhu for Master._ Nhu held his hand over the bones, fingers suspended moments from the wreckage of the old life.

 

Only now Genji noticed the toothmarks nibbled on the leg bones and ribs, and the cracked and missing fingers. It was not the cleave and poke of a lucky vulture’s beak-- he identified the shadows of molars lining the collarbone that breached from the yellow robe.

 

The skin under his visor shocked alive, electrified by the passage of a hot tear from a closed eye. There was no sense to his body. He had not cried even for Mondatta.

 

Genji took out a spade from his bag, and assembled an ice pick.

 

“I came here for him too,” he admitted to Nhu. “Lumanti said it was not right to leave him like this.”

 

_01001001: Probably._

“I thought maybe he was your friend, so I brought you…” He dug out a single white flower, withered and minus some petals for its journey among the supplies. He also offered a round, gummy stone from the waters around Tekhartha. Nhu accepted both objects silently, holding them in either hand as he watched Genji work out how to chip the bones from the ice without cracking them too badly.

 

He followed Genji down the cliff face to find a spot in the wanderer’s camp where the frost had some give. He watched Genji dig a shallow pit. Genji trimmed the edges with his spade and arranged the bones inside, adjusting what remained of the golden robe and green tassels over the top. He looked at Nhu expectantly, but Nhu was staring off into the pink speckles and nanomachine lace of the stone in his right hand. Genji waved at him. Nhu relinquished the white lily.

 

Genji set the flower atop the hollows of the ribcage. He brushed snow over the mess.

 

_01001001: Did I make a mistake?_

Nhu stared at the white mound, his hands tangled around the river stone. Genji steered him down to his knees, guided his hands over the head of the grave, and pressed on the back of his brass knuckles until he released the stone into the snow.

 

“It is not a mistake to do this much, no matter what you believe.” Genji stood up, only to flatten his palms and bow his torso forward straight from his hips. When he checked, Nhu was imitating him. Neither of them could sing like the other Shambali.

 

_01001001: Goodbye, Master._

Genji watched Nhu from the corner of his eyes. Nhu stood, yet remained fixed on the rudimentary grave for a long time.

 

_01001001: You and I will meet again. I love you, so I could wait forever. You will see how much I have grown. There will be no demons to keep you. I will be strong, Master._

Nhu had the captivating blue of the ice in his indicators, a clean light without any green.

 

“I think this is a nice place to visit,” Genji said, and his intruding voice startled the monk. “It is beautiful here. But maybe it is not a place where you should linger for so long alone. Too many old spirits.” He ticked his hand back and forth in front of his face. Nhu looked across the ancient campsite.

 

_01001001: If so, we found Paradise._

Nhu coughed, venting steam from the openings of his throat and abdomen. Genji touched his shoulder, peering at the battery pack dangling from his spine, but its solar wings had opened wide. It reminded him of a remora skimming the back of an enormous manta ray with the sun on its belly and the night on its back. He had seen it at the aquarium in Motobu. They announced when the manta died a few weeks later, but said nothing of its lost passengers. He could not remember exactly when he had gone, but he remembered the ancient beast’s wings opening wide in the water, and the glow of the remora beneath the aquarium lights.

 

“Can I carry you back?” he offered with a flashy green grin. Nhu tipped his head away and walked off.

 

_01001001: That is impossible._

Genji had never met a proud Shambali. Mondatta always carried himself in devastating elegance, but Genji knew his true face: stooped over, sweeping snow from his porch. He let Nhu stride ahead of him, rushing forward only when disturbances crackled through that blue-eyed processor and briefly kidnapped all balance. Lurking behind a monk making his way through the wilderness and wastelands colored Genji with serene familiarity. Nhu’s path from the mountain peak was much easier than his own, and Genji realized he probably never saw the warriors lost in the snow.

 

They arrived to a growing crowd, the green and yellow flags of their clothing an intertwining beacon down the mountainside. Lumanti stood at the front. Nhu bowed to her, a gesture most Shambali reserved for Genji. She nodded uncertainly, and took the cowboy hat from his head. Nhu shifted upright as she felt the spine of him, and he offered her his battery pack. Lumanti paled, covering it with both hands and guiding it back up to his chest. Nhu accepted the many arms of his brothers and sisters with a distant blue puff of his lights.

 

Chakor, who had already taken responsibility for his other errant brother at his home, announced a claim on Nhu. The engineer had easy access to the three of them at one house. Lumanti and Genji surveyed Nhu’s face for his reaction to a common village life, but Nhu acquiesced with a shrug. Only his proximity networking functions were available, so many Shambali clung to the procession back to Chakor’s house, chattering away with him.

 

Genji shed his digging tools and pennants against the nearest wooden fence and set off for the valley below. One lost brother to go.

 

A handful of misty spring days, and he was walking through young flowers on the bank of a river north.

 

There, he found discarded canary robes beneath the crooked tentacle of a log.

 

Lumanti accepted the bright clothing with an open hand and a calm tone. But when Genji moved to embrace her, she shoved him off with a burst of static from her synthesizer. She held the yellow wings of cloth against her face like a veil as he withdrew. When she did not relax, he let himself out of her home. He did not want to say anything to her about it, but he thought the loss of just one brother was very fortunate.

 

He retreated to his loft to hang a new bell out back and catch up on sleep. The chiming of the seasonal winds knocked him straight out, but there were no dreams waiting to welcome him. He woke anxious, primed for some intruder in his dark room, a demon to fall on him. He detected the faint breaths of the sky on the roof, but could not hear his bell. Mousey metal squeaking floated out back in its place.

 

Genji dressed brown and amber, quick at it now, and thrust open the back door of his home.

 

The enormous Russian omnic cloaked in holograms investigated the inside of the bell cup with her notched finger. Her circular lens adjusted slowly onto him standing in the doorway with his hands perched on the front of his sash band. Signal lights studded the inside of the aperture, all crimson as she targeted him.

 

“Good morning,” he greeted, raising his open palm and circling it beside his head. Her aperture focus was very telling, springing up and down his body until he made the gesture, then constricting at his orbiting appendage. She used her empty arm cannon to make a roller pin wave back at him. He lifted his hand toward the bell. “You can have it…” He curled his fingers back toward himself.

 

“Elizaveta,” she answered, voice a crowbar on an anvil, ringing at the end.

 

“I have plenty of supplies to make more,” Genji excused with a little bow. Elizaveta released the chime from its post on her fingertip, her holograms lifting off her body in a white mane as she pivoted toward him-- torso first, then in steps of her hunched goat-angle legs on the creaking walkway.

 

“If that is true, perhaps I will leave this one you made, and you can teach me to make my own,” Elizaveta proposed, her radials of light quivering as she spoke.

 

“That is a good idea.” Genji scooted out of the doorway to let her in and crossed the room to his dresser. “They are simple, but they have a clear sound,” he hummed. Elizaveta only stepped in so far as the doorway, blocking the sun with her boxy body. The bell rang behind her, echoing between the hollows of her armor.

 

“It reminds me of Master,” she said, and Genji’s hand slowed at the drawer handle. He looked up, and Elizaveta held a blue hologram of omnicode above her hands. A recording of a single meditation glyph played from deep in her chassis, and the omnicode disintegrated gold.

 

“Yes,” he agreed. “That too.”

 

“I cannot learn from you now.”

 

“Eh? Why not?” He had just turned back to the dresser. Elizaveta lifted the rectangular block of her chin at the other side of the loft, holograms fluffing around her torso like so many sunkissed feathers. Genji went to his front door and slid it open.

 

Chittering Shambali filled his walkway. More flocked in the courtyard below. When he appeared, a field of blue lights looked up at him.  “Wah!” Genji exclaimed helplessly, blinking his visor over them all. Chakor stuck his arm out from the front ranks of the gathering, and Genji helped him to his unsteady feet. Chakor’s other hand clasped Nhu’s wrist, so Nhu stood up too, hanging off him like a splendorous silver branch.

 

“We were talking this morning about the gift sent to you long ago. We have long been curious as to what was inside. But you have not been here to open it.” Chakor’s eyelight pulsed. “Master wanted to know, too.” He released Nhu to cross his arms around his wine-colored torso. “If it is your secret, we can respect that.”

 

“Come in,” Genji laughed. Chakor’s face popped after him in shocked silvery glee. “Though I am not sure you will all fit.” Genji headed inside and propped his mattress on the wall, spreading his blankets into rugs across the floor. “I have something to show you especially, Brother,” he cooed to Chakor, who blushed neon blue.

 

He gave the Shambali his old white uniform, and they asked him to put it on. It fit easily over his robes; he supposed this body was a little thinner, though at least his shoulders still ran the fabric tight. They asked him about the spiral symbols on each breast. He flapped his ghost arms at his nearest siblings, making them squeal. Nhu followed the bird-like sweeps with sharp twitches of his head. Chakor was the first one to touch the sleeve, and when Genji nodded, other hands came from all sides, resting lightly on his back and shoulders, confirming the cotton.

 

Genji shook off their hands with a rustle of his shoulders, and rose to collect the photo frame from his drawer. He handed it to Chakor, who stared at the contents blankly. Genji leaned over the top and tapped the green hair behind the glass. He propped his hands on his hips and stared at Chakor while the omnic contemplated the young man’s image.

 

Chakor’s face snapped towards him. Genji kidnapped another of his brothers from the floor and clasped him around the shoulder, holding out a victory sign with his other hand, though that was not quite photo-accurate. Chakor looked down again, synth rattling. The other monk beside Genji escaped his claws, bending forward to investigate the photo upside-down. Other Shambali bustled around Chakor’s shoulders.

 

“This is my age?” Chakor estimated, studying the human figures.

 

“Close.” Genji nodded. Chakor pulled his finger down the photograph’s shadowy bicep.

 

“You were soft like this,” he said.

 

Before Genji could respond, Elizaveta grunted alert in the back doorway and shuffled aside to admit a couple new parties.

 

“Thought we might be able to get in this way!” Hira exclaimed to his partner, a pale-lighted Lumanti. “Heard there was a big to-do in here.” He coaxed her forward. “Hey Genji,” he added. Genji nodded, and motioned them to the umbra of free space in the center of the room. Curiosity coloring her, Lumanti mulled the corner of his shirt between her fingers. Chakor waved the photo frame at Hira, who squatted down next to him. Genji pulled off his extra layer and threw it over Lumanti’s shoulders.

 

“Everyone likes the material,” he chuckled. She crossed her arms over her chest to pull in the halves.

 

“It is warm,” she sighed, lowering her chin to her collar struts.

 

“You okay?” Genji asked her, softer this time. Everyone else was ogling the photograph, recording little of their side conversation. Lumanti nodded.

 

“Hira helped me stop working for a little while,” she admitted.

 

“This is Brother Genji,” Chakor said, drawing Lumanti’s attention as he pointed to the green ghost in the photograph. Hira took the frame in-hand and blinked at it. He stood slowly, brown eyes flashing the candlelight as they switched from the photo to Genji’s body. He handed the frame to Lumanti.

 

Genji turned his head to survey her reaction. Hira’s arms thumped in around him from his blind spot. The Shambali noticed with whistles of their voiceboxes. Hira was warm and weighty against him, made purely of brown skin and silk. Genji’s systems jumped at the close smell of tea and balsam. He held up his hands beneath Hira’s arms, palms out in feeble protection.

 

“You don’t have to-- you will cause them to--” he bleated, but already mechanical arms joined the two of them. His family swallowed him whole, and he was hot and rejuvenated between them. The tension fell out of his back, and the delicate lines of a human hand rubbed the meeting of his chrome shoulderblades.

 

“I know,” the boy whispered in his ear. He thumped the back of Genji’s head with his palm, and broke the web of arms with a surfacing backwards step. His wrist rested over Genji’s shoulder.

 

“It’s okay,” Genji bristled.

 

“It’s not,” Hira said. “But now I see why they call you strong.” Lumanti handed the frame back, nonplussed. Hira and Genji looked at the image together. “This photo is pretty faded,” Hira wondered aloud.

 

“Yes. I am a gross old man now.” Genji made curly fingers at Hira to see if he would withdraw. He did not. “Underneath, I am just a skeleton covered in wrinkles. I am a hundred years old!” Lumanti’s synth rustled in discordant disapproval beside him. Hira grinned.

 

“Cool,” he declared in his accented Nepali. “Why, that’s much older than the invention of advanced cybernetics!” Genji blinked at him.

 

“Hira was a student even before he came to us,” Lumanti piped into the silence. She glowed at the boy. “He studied engineering at the university in Mumbai. He is very smart.” Genji’s visor dulled.

 

“You don’t like college brats, Genji?” Hira laughed, a rich, rolling sound. Genji shook his head.

 

“It is just me being old,” he excused, and ratcheted up his elderly growl: “In my day, we did not have universities!” Hira was nothing but smiles, energized by the grumpy put-on.

 

“Yeah?” He winked at Genji. “I guess a hundred years ago, they definitely did not have anything like that.” Genji nodded solemn agreement. Lumanti looked away from the two of them. Did she think it was inappropriate? He could tell by the halo off her forehead that her lights were burning very bright. When he glanced back at Hira, the boy had moved his thumb over the second figure in the photo, pursing his lips questioningly.

 

“That man,” Genji told him, all senior citizenry lost from his voice. “Is my brother, Hanzo.”

 

“And is he old too?” Hira intercepted, lips playing joyfully for a moment until some clarity shone in the dark of his eyes. “Still alive?” he hoped, with more consideration to his tone.

 

“Last I checked,” Genji hissed to play the topic off. No such luck.

 

“Will you bring him for us to meet?” Chakor asked, and Genji became aware of the whole rodeo of Shambali now investigating the black-haired youth in the photo. He only realized he had not responded when Hira found a new smile for him, no longer joking, eyes full of firelight.

 

“Maybe it is beyond your power,” he suggested. “Old men can be stubborn. I know all about that.” He shut his eyes.

 

“Did you get hurt at your university?” Genji asked him. “Is that why you came here?” Hira’s pretty face screwed up in thought.

 

“I cannot say my social life has been painless,” he joked. “But I came here because I want to make the world a better place. I want humans and omnics to live in peace, and I believe the Iris has more to tell me about that than a degree. Or maybe, knowing one will enhance my understanding of the other. Everything is entropy-- until the Iris decides otherwise. Until we will it so with our bodies and souls.” He raised his trimmed eyebrows. “My parents do think I am crazy. I guess that hurts a little too. But I convinced them to come visit…in the summer, when the snow is less. My hope is that they will understand better then. Maybe your brother, too?”

 

“That is not really the issue,” Genji muttered.

 

“Really?” Hira wondered, thumbing his full lip.

 

“Perhaps you ought to tell us a story about you and your brother,” Lumanti intervened, drawing both their eyes. “In case we never have a chance to meet in this world.” The rest of the Shambali lit up eagerly. Genji searched the circle of ecstatic metal faces.

 

“I know how much you all like stories,” he allowed in a sigh, sitting down on crossed legs. The Shambali passed a cushion in hand-over-hand for him. Hira plopped on the wood beside him, grinning. “I cannot think of any good ones about Hanzo just yet, but I can tell you a story my father told me. It is not about us,” he insisted, and Hira’s expression limped on uncertainly. “It is about-- people that lived a long time ago, I guess. Two great dragon brothers.”

 

* * *

 

Hira left, a quiver in his lower lip as he waved to Genji on his way out the door. The rest of the Shambali paired up as they progressed out into the afternoon. Chakor tugged Nhu along like a little kite that, if not properly managed, could fly off and land just about anywhere. Elizaveta’s ample arms had space for all the bell materials from Genji’s drawer, and she hauled them off to make her shrines across the village, her steps ringing across the snow.

 

Lumanti remained on the stoop, utilizing the walkway’s good surveillance of the village commons to watch the others find their homes. When Genji stepped out to join her, she extended her hand between their hips. He placed his fingers between hers.

 

“Want to come to the valley with me?” he asked, and she peered up at him. “We can search for Brother.”

 

“You do not need to do that anymore,” she told him. “He has gone far from this place. I am sure that soon Tekhartha will strip him from our network, and then he will be lost forever.”

 

“Not forever,” Genji countered. “Nothing is forever. I will prove it to you.” Lumanti brightened. It was the light of a star. “I will bring you Hanzo,” he offered. “Then you will see that no river is too wide.” He posed two fingers under his chin. She imitated him, cocking her head. Genji laughed. Lumanti’s hands fanned over him, holding the sides of his face as she analyzed his springy green visor light.

 

“I would like to meet such a man,” she said.

 

“You sound a little scary,” he peeped. “Hey, want to come cook at the restaurant a while? I told Dayahang I would help him.” Her array pulsed, her back straightened with sudden possibility.

 

“I would like that,” she told herself as much as him in a wan, wondering statement that reminded him of Zenyatta. They walked out into the village. “The only brothers you have to search for are out in the world,” she said as they crossed the walkways toward the restaurant. “It must be that you will leave soon.”

 

“A week or two still, depending on how clumsy my hands are,” Genji answered honestly. “I am helping Dayahang here, but also Chakor. And he is teaching me. Yet it will also be good when I go. I think I may be getting in the way of some things.” Lumanti whitened in shock.

 

“What do you mean?” she demanded.

 

“You will see,” he told her thoughtfully. Lumanti pressed her hands together in front of her stomach.

 

“Would you also bring Master, when you visit again?”

 

“Yes,” Genji promised. “It will not be difficult anymore.”

 

When they finished propping the chairs on the tables and sweeping the empty floors, Dayahang offered them the night’s leftovers. The casserole they designed looked and smelled monstrous. Genji sat across from Lumanti at a corner table and bit into the greasy layers under the guidance of a single candle. He told her not to be dissuaded by their dinner’s ugliness, and she cautiously accepted the data packet he sent her.

 

He restrained his grin until her lights shrank all the way to pasty yellow needle pricks in her forehead. She clapped her hands over her immobile jaw and he laughed. Her voice scrambled a formless yell as she heard him. She grabbed the back of his hand, pulling on his arm as she groaned through the taste. Her agony ended in laughter.

 

“That good?” Dayahang sniffed, audience to the entire exchange as he washed and dried his hands in the nearby basin.

 

* * *

 

Genji went to Tekhartha in the morning while the Shambali sang in the atrium. Nhu sat on the western end of the island, his robes loosened from his shoulders and all three of his repaired primaries locked to inputs on the floor. Rather than holding a mudra to meditate, he balanced a round river stone on his palms. Genji noticed other stones left at the southern and eastern cardinals.

 

_01001001: Chakor, Lumanti. We learn._

Nhu did not move. Genji studied the monk’s pointy serenity alone in the misted room.

 

“You should be with the others.” He gestured heavenward. “Even if you do not sing yet.”

 

_01001001: You do not sing, you are away. Speak to yourself._

 

Genji snorted. The engineer had taken Nhu’s bullet. Nhu spent days out in the village, but Chakor complained that he was also lurking in the mountain instead of coming home at night sometimes. That he was not sleeping when he did, because the effort was empty of dreams. After the third day of such grumbling at the sewing house, Genji proposed Lumanti moderate a discussion between the two. Apparently the stones were the result.

 

“How do I tell Tekhartha I am going away?” he asked Nhu, to no response. Tekhartha flirted with him the past couple days under the alias _tusot,_ always revealing its true face of _samss_ just before vanishing from his contact list.

 

Genji did what he could. He got on his knees before the omnium, setting a basket on the floor and lining out his supplies from it: a couple slices of the paper he requisitioned from the monastery stores, a pot of ink and a bowl to pour it in, and the calligraphy pen Lumanti gave him. Shambali offerings were always half-complete. At the base of Tekhartha’s tower in front of him rested an embroidery hoop with a section of tapestry sewn inside. Chakor contributed something, but he let Tekhartha figure out the meaning of it. Genji sat down with a design in mind, a word that puzzled him often, so it would be an enjoyable challenge for the machine. A toy shaped like Genji, stamped with his state of mind.

 

He flattened the first piece of paper on the column wall and taped it in place with a magnet. He clicked the notch on his pen, summoning the brush mold with a shimmer of reconfiguring hardlight. The paper did not feel fine under his hand, like what his father used, but swirling his brush through the ink pumped electricity up his arm. The brush-hairs dripping black could have been swords full of blood, he was so excited. Lumanti said Tekhartha had no love of human things, but crayons and paintings and processed threads were those. Tekhartha loved to create. Consideration was a form of hesitation. Genji slashed his brush across the paper, dancing his hand down the canvas.

 

He put one arm around the column and leaned in to dry the paper with the breath of the vents down his torso. Nhu’s head lifted at him. Genji peeled the paper off and held it toward the dove white innards of Tekhartha with both hands.

 

_CHILD._

Genji’s chest slowed eventually. He glanced across the glistening bodies of Tekhartha’s inert manipulators, intertwined with each other under the ledge of floating omnic spheres. He gathered his magnet and taped the calligraphy to one of the support columns alongside the other offerings. Nhu’s head tracked him as he went to gather his supplies.

 

_01001001: Would you like to join, Genji?_

Genji settled from toes to heels, rising straight. Tekhartha’s cable extended out to him, pointed straight and white like a divine arrow toward his throat. He folded his hands behind his head, and raised the scales on his neck. From the exposed crevices, Genji pulled three red cables. They were no different from a Shambali’s. Even the microprint identifying the trademark on the sides was the same. Tekhartha’s manipulator grew fuzzy at the closest end, sprouting slender iridescent lines that fished toward Genji’s palmful of wiring, never quite touching.

 

He looked over the trembling wire at Nhu.

 

“I wish I was not in such a hurry.” As he retracted the cables, Tekhartha’s cable wilted from him and wound back to its counterpart. “But there is still something I have to do. And I think I can find my own way, once I reach Master.”

 

 _01001001: Master._ The clean line of Nhu’s shoulders drooped, stone tumbling from his hands as he fanned them over his neck.

_01001001: I will be with you, Brother._

* * *

 

The shuttle was gone from its landing site by the river. Genji sat down, wrapped in his green and black travel cloak, heavy bag lined over his shoulder. Athena appeared in the night with warning lights cycling red across her belly, a jellyfish bobbing out of the stars.

 

“Greetings Genji!” she exclaimed from the loudspeakers after turning on the spotlight at her nose and illuminating him in the grass. “It is good news,” she hummed as he walked up the ramp. “We had our first successful mission.”

 

“Oh?” he prompted, hooking his bag over one of the bars beside the passenger wells. He flipped his hood down so that it puddled around his neck, and tugged his ribbon free. The table across from him was covered in a recent mess of playing cards, and photos had been tacked on the walls. Athena took off, and Genji moved closer, examining a picture of Angela in a witch costume. A snarly-smiled man-- Lindholm, he recalled --dressed as a Viking beside her. She looked happy.

 

“Winston and Lena Oxton prevented Talon agents from retrieving Doomfist’s titular weapon. It is exciting to have proof of our enterprise. It seems to have rallied others as well. Did you perhaps see it on the news?” Athena popped a hologram of Miss Platinum over the cards table.

 

“I don’t go on the Net much,” Genji admitted, syncing with the report. The image switched from Miss Platinum’s news desk to the portraits of two people. One was a blurry hulk in a white mask. The other was the blue woman. Genji leaned in, following the jagged line of her exposed breastbone with his finger.

 

“Yes.” Athena dropped her voice briefly in sympathy. “Lena Oxton reported Widowmaker’s participation in the murder of the Shambali leader.”

 

Genji had never been able to ask Lumanti. It would have hurt her. But in his gut, somehow, he had known.

 

Athena’s voice lanced back up like a spring flower. “Did you enjoy your visit?”

 

Genji tilted his head at the nearest camera pocket watching him from the wall.

 

“It was productive,” he said. He waggled his finger at the hologram. “Did they kill her?”

 

“Kill?” Athena sounded a little strained. “Unfortunately the Talon operatives escaped, but without their prize. I am sure that had he the opportunity, Winston would gladly place them in an appropriate detention facility.”

 

“There is nothing more cruel.” Genji looked back at Widowmaker. “Did Zenyatta go with them?”

 

“No… He is not classified as an agent. Surely we would not force Emily on a mission either! Our Overwatch will be volunteers.” She paused. “He does seem to possess some helpful capacity. Especially with Winston. He has assisted several times. Should I request that he join?”

 

“I would not want that.”

 

“Oh. Is it your decision?” Athena inquired.

 

* * *

 

She landed on the same cracked pad they had departed from, outside the compound fenced with broken police tape. A squat woman stood just past the safety circle painted on the concrete, undressed to a blue tank top, fuzzy coat tied off around her waist. She pulled a hovering sled full of supplies, and blinked uncertainly as the shuttle’s bay doors whisked open.

 

Athena rattled off in Mandarin as Genji descended the ramp. He picked out “warmest greetings” and that the woman’s name was “Dr. Zhou”. Dr. Zhou’s small lips puckered round as her eyes flowed down Genji’s patterned robes, gaze blanked from view as her glasses caught the sunset. Her tank top had an Overwatch logo printed on it, but the orange connector piece was green. She asked Athena a question, and Athena answered in English:

 

“Not at all. I have nothing like that at this time. This is Agent Shimada.” To Genji’s surprise, a bulb of recognition clicked in the doctor’s pupils.

 

“I like your hair,” he said. Specifically he liked the pin in it, with a red jewel bubbling on the tip. And now, it accented her cheeks nicely.

 

“Oh, thanks!” She propped her glasses up. “I’m sorry to ask this so suddenly, I know we have not met before, but do you know…” Genji leaned forward to indicate he was listening. Dr. Zhou’s cheeks flushed ever darker. “…why the front door won’t open?”

 

“We installed a manual lock as a temporary measure after a recent Talon attack,” Athena reported helpfully. “Someone on the inside will have to open it for you.”

 

“Oh…” Dr. Zhou nodded, turning around slowly and tugging her sled. “I will have to tell Mr. Lindholm. Though, why wouldn’t Winston open it for us?”

 

“I am afraid he is unavailable,” Athena provided. Dr. Zhou thumbed her chin. “Please, take Genji with you and have patience. I am sure someone will be with you shortly.”

 

Dr. Zhou brightened, and it looked the same as when she was embarrassed, all apples and white teeth. She flicked her hand at Genji.

 

“Alright. Come on!” she told him, and they walked together past the fence. The first thing they encountered, lurking past a semi-intact pile of Overwatch logo storage boxes, was the hulking carcass of an E-54 tank. Its cannon rested in their general direction. Genji gripped the handle of his wakizashi, but restrained himself from drawing.

 

A little yellow bird sat in the E-54’s cannon barrel.

 

Dr. Zhou kept stumbling on with her cart a few steps before she realized Genji was not with her. She turned around, jumped at the sight of the ancient machine, then she wiggled her hand at it. “Hi Bastion!” she said. “It’s alright, it was just a ship.”

 

The E-54 stuck an applicator out of the hutch beside its cannon and wiggled back.

 

“ _Bee-boop-wee,_ ” it answered. Dr. Zhou let go of her sled to pat her hands on her thighs, and Bastion swiveled into its recon configuration, clanking up to her. Its back turned to Genji, apparently forgetting him. He dropped his hand from his sword. The yellow bird flew ahead of the procession to peck the head of a short, bearded man in overalls waving his fists at a brand-new blue hardlight door.

 

“Ow!” Torbjörn swore. “What is it this time?!” He turned around, lips going straight for their deepest crags as he considered Genji. “Hmm…”

 

“Hello, Mr. Lindholm.” Genji pronounced the name as best he could. He could not remember the man outside of Winston’s graduation, but Torbjörn’s blue eyes popped.

 

“Ohhh!” he stammered, and followed with a guess: “Genji!” Genji nodded, and Torbjörn stomped over to hug him. “Genji my boy, how are ya?!” He patted Genji’s lower back. “It’s okay,” he rumbled in an aside to Dr. Zhou. “This one’s got a human brain!”

 

“Actually--” Genji started.

 

“Though I could’ve sword they said you were dead,” Torbjörn blared over him, leaning back from his full-bodied clutch of Genji’s robe. “Well, no matter. Not the first time they got that wrong! Good to see ya, lad! Now let’s put our heads together and see if we can’t get this damned contraption to work…” The door opened behind him.

 

It was Zenyatta. The jacket Genji gave him was zipped up his front, ragged silk peeking from under the collar. Winston had given him some orange sweatpants to complete the ensemble. “Invaders!” Torbjörn declared at the sight of him.

 

Zenyatta’s hand lay frozen above the door switch, his head turned at Genji’s dress.

 

“Because it is good to see a familiar face,” the monk said slowly. “After you have been away.”

 

Genji swept forward and pulled Zenyatta off his seat on the air, swallowing him in silk. Zenyatta’s arms tightened across his back as their faces angled together. Torbjörn, taking this as a form of assailant capture, stumped past the doorway and glared around the lab.

 

“What’d you do with Winston?!” he demanded, and Zenyatta briefly extended a slender arm upstairs, where Winston lay collapsed on a tire in front of his command console. “You killed him!” Torbjörn cried, hustling up the steps to revive the scientist. “Bastion!” he barked from the upper floor. “Apprehend that no-good omnic!”

 

Zenyatta’s fingers tangled in Genji’s new charcoal ribbon. Genji staggered his weight onto his heels as Zenyatta’s legs made an iron cross over his hips. Gear-driven footfalls whomped up behind them.

 

“ _Bwoople,_ ” the E-54 said beside Genji’s head. Genji lifted his face a little out of Zenyatta’s, eyeing the long sensor bar gazing down at him. It held its hands near their shoulders, but they were so close together it seemed to have trouble differentiating who it was supposed to capture.

 

“Um,” Dr. Zhou’s voice floated in from behind them, and Genji turned back into the warmth of Zenyatta. “Bastion, do you want to help me unpack?” She gave a suggestive tug on her hoversled, and a small drone uncapped from the charge pack on the end, whizzing a spiral through the spacious laboratory. Bastion’s bird flew in and began chasing it immediately, and the drone zipped through the air with an alarmed electronic creaking.

 

“ _Bip?_ ” Bastion turned its head one-eighty after the airborne fracas, and lifted its palms as it clunked around the lab after the bird. Its quaking footfalls woke Winston, who yawned pink and fang-filled, then greeted Torbjörn drowsily from his tire. Dr. Zhou called her drone to follow her, and the bird settled on top of a tire swing hanging from the ceiling, cheeping his victory. Bastion slowed once the fighting seemed done, and recalculated priorities, deciding to march off after Dr. Zhou.

 

“Winston said I get my own lab,” she offered conversationally. “It should be exciting!”

 

“ _Oo-wee!_ ” Bastion answered, and followed her through a set of sliding doors. Genji lowered his hand from the back of Zenyatta’s head, still resting his visor just over the monk’s face, watching Torbjörn gab at Winston. Zenyatta waited for him to look down, then released him and turned down a different hall.

 

As they walked, Genji detected footsteps in the surrounding rooms, flickers of conversation and Athena communiques. On the wall just ahead of the next corner, a set of Valkyrie wings fanned under a glass panel beside an inert Caduceus. His eyes lingered on the tech as he followed Zenyatta into the next metal barrel of the catacombs. They came to a door that Zenyatta was able to open by holding his hand before it.

 

Inside lay a suite of rooms facing the sunset sea. Long bar windows of configurable widths fashioned eyes to the coiling peninsulas and distant waterborne tankers of Gibraltar. Zenyatta slowed when the door closed behind them. Genji collected him off the wind and carried him toward the plain tan bed peeking through a doorframe. Zenyatta’s array blinked unsteadily. He rested his hand on Genji’s bared arm.

 

Genji set him on the edge of the bed and propped his fingers around the jacket zipper. Zenyatta nodded faintly. Genji undressed him, dropping each chunk of textile carelessly on the floor, except for the silk wrapping at Zenyatta’s neck which he folded and set on a dresser. He unshelved his swollen, heavy bag and his swords and set both next to Zenyatta’s things. He took off Zenyatta’s sandals, crouching to rub his bare feet for a few minutes.

 

Genji stood and reached for the black sash keeping his robes in place. Zenyatta took his wrist. Genji abandoned the motion to climb onto the bed. Zenyatta drifted off the mattress as it bounced with Genji’s weight. Genji gathered the monk and sat down against the backboard, Zen coaxed into his lap.

 

“Open the window,” he said, and Zenyatta reached under his arm. The glass parted as his fingers neared, enough to allow the warm ocean wind and the cries of gulls in. Genji rested his palm on the side of Zenyatta’s head, holding him to his chest. "I know it is hard, but it is time to sleep." Zenyatta’s arm relaxed into a drape down Genji’s bent knee. “At home, no one is having any dreams. Going to bed feels more like…going on low-power for a while. It’s not fulfilling at all.”

 

“Mondatta,” Zenyatta rasped, exhausted.

 

“He cannot help now,” Genji reflected. “But I am sure you learned, right? It just feels strange, because it is the opposite of meditation. You cannot focus on sleeping. You cannot point at a dream. You have to let everything go. I think you should listen to the wind a little while, Zen. I am right here with you.”

 

“Genji.” Zenyatta formed a hand over his shoulder. Genji sat quietly at first, watching the indicators above the monk’s eyeslots flash alert after cycles of furtive dullness.

 

“Did you know?” he asked, soothing the golden polygonal on Zenyatta’s chassis, sinking his hand over the outside of Zenyatta’s hip. Zenyatta turned his face into the scent of the green robe. “It does not work like how I thought, but I can heal people too,” Genji explained. The etched spheres around Zenyatta settled a crescent at his feet. Zenyatta’s body went slack as the last artifact touched the sheets. Genji leaned into the headboard, sighing as he closed his eyes. “Thank you, Master.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter:** So this is where you grew up!
>   * In most Indian religions, a central concept is the endless cycle of death and rebirth called _samsara_ (from Sanskrit, lit. "wandering"). Liberation from samsara is the fundamental goal of both Hinduism and Buddhism. In Buddhism, this liberation (Nirvana) occurs when someone relinquishes all cravings and emotions, embracing a state of nothingness called _sunyata_. Sunyata requires perceiving oneself without attachment, and creates the ability to allow emotional impulses to pass by without lasting impact. In this sense sunyata is a methodology for attaining inner peace rather than a literal theological state, but its literal vs. theoretical nature is a subject of debate between different Buddhist disciplines. Notably, attaining Nirvana demands an individual acknowledge that they have no intrinsic nature or soul. The Hindu counterpart, Moksha, is attained by accepting that one's true self is the soul, and understanding that the entire universe is a part of that soul.
>   * _anemone_ \- an ocean organism with lots of tentacles and a nasty sting, but also a group of flowers that come in a variety of colors, one type with white petals and a bluish-black center
>   * _topi_ \- a stubby cloth hat with colorful patterns that is worn in Nepal
>   * _ke cha?_ \- Nepali slang, "what's up?"
>   * _bhai_ \- Nepali endearment for "little brother", though it does not have to be literal and can refer to anyone as a form of kinship language
>   * _Namaste/Namaskar_ \- lit. "I bow to you", extrapolated in Hinduism to "I bow to the divine in you". A greeting derived from Sanskrit, can be spoken alongside or replaced with a short bow with hands clasped upright beneath the chin. Depending on context, it can also express gratitude. In Nepal, "namaskar" is the more respectful form of "namaste" and typically used for formal greetings or with elders/superiors.
>   * _Motobu_ \- a town in Japan known chiefly for Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, which was largest in the world until the construction of the Georgia Aquarium
>   * _Mumbai_ \- the wealthiest and most populous city in India, with a metropolitan area population of 21 million in 2016
>   * Technically, calligraphy should use Mulberry paper and 75-year-old inksticks (many of which are carved with elaborate flower patterns or other forms of art on their own), along with a seal to identify the calligrapher. Beginners typically use bottled ink though. In Japan, calligraphy takes on a special meaning derived from a Chinese variant of Buddhism called Zen Buddhism: the artist has just one chance to create their work, so calligraphy is thought to reflect not just its subject (a given word or phrase), but in a very direct way, the soul of its artist. Thus the best calligraphy is derived from instantaneous motion rather than years of practice or intense effort. The most desirable state of mind for writing calligraphy is called _mushin_ , where a person is free of reasoning and judgement and draws their movements with instinctive effiency. Because mushin is prized for martial artists as well, famous warriors are very often also major calligraphy enthusiasts.
>   * To expand on Zen Buddhism: it is a form of Buddhism where knowledge of Buddhist doctrine is unnecessary, and the realization of Buddhist ideals is created through meditation exercises and interactions between a teacher and student.
>   * Between Nepal and Gibraltar, there are 8,302 km (5,159 mi), and a time difference of approximately -5 hours if you start in Nepal.
> 



	22. Resurrection

 

In his dream he lived on a tree that grew out of the ocean, different kinds of fruit hanging from its coiled branches, its canopy full of fuzzy green leaves that hid him well. He did not eat fruit, but he liked shading himself in the smell and appearance of such pleasant objects. The one who planted the tree, sacrificing an arm to create the knobbled sapling, climbed out of the water every sunrise to keep him company.

 

There was no land in any direction, though each day he flew as long as he could before nightfall. It was not that he minded the dark water, or the one who lived there. But the salt dried out his scales when he lingered for too long, and made brittle paste of his fur. His friend showed him the isolation was not eternal: soil grew from the tree’s roots, and one day he would have a whole island to himself. Genji liked the idea of lazing on the sand in the sun. Yet he thought it would be just as fair to brave the depths and the changes to his body, and live forever with the one who had shown him such kindness.

 

He pushed his face through the surface of the water and opened his eyes. Zenyatta hovered close on the other side. His hand of naked bones posed on Genji’s heart, dyed white by the late morning falling through the windows. Nine spheres tensed candle-like around the bed.

 

“You are crying,” Zenyatta said, and Genji became cognizant of the fluid balling around his jaw.

 

“It’s happy…” he wheezed. “Or something terrifying that I have happily forgotten.” He clicked his visor at Zenyatta. Zenyatta’s mask cocked to one side, motors whisking in his neck.

 

“You were moving a great deal,” he persisted. His spheres retracted to a hoop around his shoulders, the heat of each shell bristling across Genji’s chest. “I thought perhaps, a nightmare.” Zenyatta was all vigilance and pedagogic gravity, a viral reincarnation of his brother. He fixed his hand into a fist. “A mistake.”

 

Genji caught an oncoming sphere before it could reach the nest. It vibrated against his fingertips, chiming muted in his hands.

 

“Thank you for helping me find my runaway dreams,” he told Zenyatta. “Whatever form they take is better than emptiness.” The world was close to sunrise still, the best hour to watch sacred symmetries alight the monk’s wiry back. Genji thought his hands looked more solid today, nearly drawing shadows from the blue honey of Gibraltar. “It seems you slept well too, Master.” Zenyatta sat straighter, planing his shoulders. Breezes strummed the pillars of his abdomen, light clarinets stitched between his windchimes.

 

“You were here,” he said.

 

When the empty slot in Zenyatta’s chain cycled forward, Genji nudged the captive sphere home. Zenyatta received his lost piece shivering, other hands swimming forward to erect it above his head. Lime roots seared from activated sphere to worshipping palms. The rest of the mala flushed past his shoulders to create a frame.

 

“Glad I am good for something,” Genji joked, though he folded Zenyatta’s words carefully within himself. Clouds fell across the sun, and the great web behind Zenyatta faded from view.

 

The chrysalis of Genji’s waking moments broke. He spilled out into a world where he had fallen asleep propped against a rustic headboard, the white wood vegetated into a file on his spine. Leaves of salt scratched hotly around his chin scars, trapped on him by the hardware of his face. An ocean wave split across the rocks outside, giving away its body for the honor of polishing the cliff’s feet. The water’s euphoria crashed static through his sensitive inputs. He needed a shower. “I will have to reset my chronometer to make sure I wake up at the right time,” he rasped in drowsy condolences. Something Lumanti said surfaced from the depths and recycled around his brain: _There is never need for apology._

Zenyatta sloughed away as Genji sat up and pivoted his heavy legs over the side of the bed. His toes swayed just off the earthen tiles. His emerald robe crinkled across his left thigh, caught on the spike of his kneecap. He tested his artificial arms on the mattress edge, and realized his aches were echoes of another life. These limbs would always have the strength to carry him from rest. This form did not get sore or old. His weariness did not come from his body.

 

A hand closed on the back of his sash as he made for the floor.

 

Genji flapped his elbow up to reveal the trespasser. Zenyatta ground his fingers into the Shambali hexagonals, pursuing the intermittent shine across the jet. “Strange that I am more attached to them than you are,” Genji said. Zenyatta’s hand stilled. Genji collected the monk’s own ratty shroud off the bedside table. Their sparring had raked the fringe into strips. Lonely stitches strapped the fragments together, forging sinkholes and irregular ripples, creating something new out of the remains.

 

He unraveled a corner of the cloak to his mask and kissed it. Hickory, dry grass, rice ferment. “I understand what both of you were trying to do.” He returned his legs to the bed. His shadow huddled over the plane of the mattress like a thoughtful monkey, the reflection of Zenyatta’s many arms coalescing around him. “You think that if they are to live in a world without Masters, they must walk out of the desert alone. Like children, if they cannot call your name, they will ask themselves instead. To be so lost is to be an adult.”

 

Genji swaddled the cloak back into its hologram of order and laid it aside. “I will never agree with what you have done.”

 

Turning to address Zenyatta, he discovered a close face following every word, a body stumped over with palm braced on the bedsheets to maintain an attachment to the world. Genji twisted on his hip, robe dripping jade off the mattress bank. Zenyatta released the covers and skimmed onto his knees, elevating his bowed back to match the height of their eyes. “They never thought of you as a parent,” Genji submitted. His stomach tightened under the lofty green cloth. “And you have never been alone among them, even when he was alive. You should have seen--” He touched his hand over his unmoving mouth, gripping the cool, reassuring chrome. “They worry about _you_ ,” he amended. “They do not claim your wisdom, like the rest of this world. Their desires are born from compassion. And that must be something you taught them, or at least you opened their eyes to it like you did mine. I see both of you in them.”

 

The wind gained fingers as it pushed through his clothing, wrapping his bold face to the window. “But I came to wonder if you think of yourself like the world does. Do you believe that the only way you can express your love to others is to teach them?”

 

“It is our actions that bring our souls to balance,” Zenyatta agreed without hesitation. “Or if you are Mondatta, it is the world we must level on our scales.” The name was a poison to his clarity, a throaty knell ensnaring his voice. Genji withheld from the impulse to embrace him, the easy comfort, one known to all the Shambali aside from their Masters. “I should be glad for him,” Zenyatta flooded a lightness into his voice. “He fed the world.” Genji flicked his shoulders back.

 

“It is not a sacrifice when someone takes your life from you.” He dropped his head, the tension in his solar plexus now. “It is only ever a violation. That is why I wish the Shambali were even more like you than they are. Willing to fight.” Gray birds patterned a diagonal past the window, ever higher on the ocean breeze. Genji studied the flashes of their thin wings dazzling by the hundreds behind the monk. Zenyatta touched his own throat. “Your absence hurt too much,” Genji charged. “Trying to be faithful to your beliefs, to him, was your only mistake. Understand that your kindness can be painful.”

 

“What would you have me do?”

 

“We cannot do anything out of obligation alone…” Genji held his tongue, mulling how to place the words. “…and expect it to have meaning.” He lost some of the authority in his shoulders. But Zenyatta nodded, and he perked back up shamelessly. “So I cannot ask you to burn incense or sing. If you do such things only for me, no one is helped or loved. I guess I can only hope that in your time here, you honored him with your actions.” Genji held his open palm toward his teacher. “If you only sulked and moped, I will be very disappointed!” Zenyatta couched his knees lower into the mattress, and rested his hands over top of them, a good student preparing his answer.

 

“I assisted Hana.”

 

Briefly, Genji saw the sun not through their stark rectangle windows, but from the dusty fractal glass of Winston’s garden dome. The light was weak in Sweden, but Winston’s hands could grow the world out of any substrate. Yet the way Zenyatta said _Hana_ \-- he meant someone’s name, and it filled his deep voice with flames. Genji scratched the back of his helmet.

 

“That will have to do,” he tutted, visor smiling green. “I will see your work later.” Zenyatta nodded again, and it was nothing like the assured tip of his chin from before. He was giddy, like Genji’s excitable shoulders. “If you are still helping others, then surely you realize: it is not just you and I left.” Zenyatta’s lights graded to a dusky, narrowing blue. “The Shambali are there. The people we meet are there. ‘Brother’…” Genji made gathering sweeps of his hands between the two of them. “It’s an important word. It means you do not ever have to be alone.”

 

“I understand.” Zenyatta gave away nothing with his tone, enforcing his courteous default. Genji scouted his hands, still arranged neatly on his knees. “Do not fret.” Zenyatta turned one hand up, freeing something to the air. “This will pass. I am just learning the importance of your words. And even if I trick myself, and believe I am somehow weary, it is still true that I slept well today. That I am in good health.”

 

“I felt the same when I woke.” Genji clapped his hand to his chest. “But it goes away, like you said.” He shifted his knees forward, getting more comfortable. His head dipped in contemplation. “Then--” The word chirped out. He recalibrated his synthesizer to a more confident depth. He balanced a hand on his hip, glaring at the monk. “Did you keep me here for a reason, Zen?” It helped to really play the synth, work his posture.

 

Genji dimmed as Zenyatta stuck his flat hand into the air, assembling a hologram of some weird omnic symbol. Individual components of the glyph slithered around, leaving pixelated slime trails. He watched the holo ballet over Zenyatta’s palm with a sniff.

 

Zenyatta relaxed his fingers, and newborn light unfurled from the top of the glyph. Kanji sprouted from the slow flap of folding text, spreading along the symmetric wings like scratched blue eyes. The omnic particles disappeared completely as the phrase rearranged into a column.

 

_CHILD,_ it read.

 

“What does this mean, Genji?” Zenyatta peered at him. Genji’s focus darted between his face and the word.

 

“It was just a game,” he muttered hastily. Zenyatta blinked his lights. “I was trying to understand something, but it was not appropriate to share like that. I don’t know why I did that.”

 

“Why is it not appropriate?” Zenyatta’s voice lost all inflection again, aside from his curt indication of the question. His array too was slick and blank, a dull tattoo on his forehead.

 

“Because it is not a question you can answer,” Genji huffed, and Zenyatta’s lights resumed activity, hologram disappearing from his wilting hand.

 

“But together, we might be able to,” Zenyatta theorized.

 

Genji’s laughter startled him.

 

Genji touched his cheek to show him he meant nothing by it. Zenyatta shut his hands into a chalice before his abdomen. “I would like to speak with you about it,” he insisted. Genji let go of him, nodding.

 

“Fine.” He rested back on his haunches. “You are right. I have not been sufficiently honest.” Zenyatta did not say anything further. His lights processed in silence, some pattern Genji had not seen before, nodes ticking on one after another to write borders and diagonals through the square array.

 

After a half-minute, Genji flapped his hand. “You want to talk about it now?’

 

Zenyatta dipped his knee into the bed and used it as an anchor, piloting his body into Genji’s. He looped one arm after the other over the back of Genji’s shoulders.

 

“Were you not just speaking of my many children?” he asked.

 

“Of how they do not exist,” Genji scolded him. Zenyatta kissed Genji in the human way, aligning his deprecated mouthseam to Genji’s shiny beveling. Genji was the one to nudge their lights together. “Guess you aren’t interested in talking.”

 

Silver fingers networked around his face, thumbs below his eyes. Genji nodded, and Zenyatta raised his jaw to the ceiling, burrowing beneath into the surrendered red cord of his neck. Genji’s chest gave him away, hiking against the hard curve of Zenyatta’s chassis. The smiling golden seam ripped a sigh from his throat. “I do forgive you,” Genji blurted, clutching the top of the dome in front of him.

 

A warm hand wired into his spine and guided him down to the bed. For a dangerous, exciting moment, he was on his stomach, losing his face in the sheets. Then Zenyatta tugged him over onto his back, and swept atop him. Genji grasped the sterling spurs of his bare hips, wondering if someone had helped him detail out all the saltwater and sand.

 

Half his chest lay open to the air, but Zenyatta chose to deconstruct all of him rather than latch to the easy flesh. He began with the layers guarding the other breast, stretching the robe off the cup of Genji’s shoulder. Green and black silk puddled around his elbow. Zenyatta bent all the way down to pace his seam across the naked metal before sheltering in the sleeve pocket billowed at Genji’s side. Starchy bedsheet fibers stretched and spread beneath them like trails on a beachhead. Zenyatta’s head bumped his underarm, and Genji flopped his hands to either side of his helmet. The sun wrote a protective talisman across the ceiling, and shone white off the relaxed curls of his fingers. “Now you miss him,” he whispered.

 

Zenyatta sat up, hand clenching on the robe fabric.

 

“ _Genji._ ” Some father Genji no longer had lived in that voice, firm in his scolding but never angry, full of love but too exhausted to care. He basked in the familiar melody of reprimand, and boosted his naked knee up to tempt Zenyatta’s eye, a mischievous twinkle at his side.

 

Zenyatta ignored his tricks and inserted an index finger down the exposed seam of his underarm, meeting the uppermost gap of a vent in his muscle. Genji puffed and twisted, lifting his crotch under the slight weight of the omnic. Zenyatta remained perfectly balanced on his chosen perch, sifting his palm down the slender openings to Genji’s black endoskeleton.

 

“I did not mean to be gone so long,” Genji confessed. “Our brothers and sisters got a little lost. I had to…find…” His knees seized upwards, feet propped away from the bed on his toes.

 

After a moment, Zenyatta withdrew his fingers from the lowest vent, a tin scrape marking his departure. He sat back and Genji’s erection was there, released from all armored paneling but unable to cut through the trap of his clothing. Zenyatta curved to look over his shoulder, sun fragmenting down his angles in a graceful spiral. Lifting himself away, he retreated off the side of the bed. His hands moored around Genji’s thighs and lugged him after, balancing his notched hips on the cliff of the mattress.

 

Gull cries pulled Genji’s eyes toward the window as Zenyatta undid the front of his sash. He laid his cheek on the sheets and listened to the piercing birds. He could smell the salt from here, riding the waves and knotting year-by-year into the hull of the Watchpoint. Wings dusted the upside-down sky. A finger smudged and undulated down his neck, draining into the well of his collar. Shadows glided past his face. Another hand offered him a pillow and faded after. Genji tucked the pillow under his head and neck, flipping his ribbon to the side so it was not trampled beneath his shoulders.

 

Zenyatta let the partitions of the sash feather down Genji’s legs. They watched each other. Genji shuddered when he breathed. “You are kind of bold today, Zen. What’s the occasion?” he probed, nonchalance struggling as Zenyatta slipped below the crest of the bed. When Genji looked down his belly, he could not see the monk anymore, just a lake of golden arms overlapping his legs and abdomen. Every hand rested still and flat upon him. Round shoulders locked to the back of his thighs, lifting. Solid silver wrists flexed beneath his lower back and coiled upward to net his hips.

 

“I love you.” Zenyatta’s voice dropped out of the air around him clear, without mechanical ripples.

 

“That is always your excuse,” Genji teased. Zenyatta drew the skirt higher up his legs, but assumed a static rigor after.

 

Genji attempted to shrug off the wait. He dropped his head back instead of searching the field of limbs for a face or recognizable form. Time saw him relax.

 

Zenyatta hugged the glossy shield of his array into Genji’s uncovered mesh, reviving him.

 

Genji clipped the open window with his tangled, messy yelp. The flock of arms clamshelled outward to take the bucks of his knees in hand. When the contraction of his thighs around the steel bulb between his legs weakened, Zenyatta spread him. Careful rounds of pressure warmed his soft parts. The familiar indent of an eyeslot grazed his thigh. Zenyatta hunkered closer, and allowed Genji rolls of his hips onto the curve of his mask. Genji panted, aware of what the omnic was trying to imitate. Zenyatta ascended, rubbing forehead first into Genji’s dick. He posed his face beneath the length of it, a cobweb of poking angles and wet metal. Zenyatta kissed Genji, and Genji fountained a precious drizzle over the top of his skull.

 

The sea of gold parted. Zenyatta’s head tightened the cloth of the green skirt as he lifted himself free, lights surfacing from behind the veil. Powerful armored legs quivered in the suspension of many hands. Genji sat up on his elbows, head rocking with his articulated shortness of breath. Zenyatta dragged his palm through the fluid scarred across his face. He examined the liquid wires stretching transparent between his fingers.

 

“Thank you,” he said, siphoning off the rest with the back of his wrist. “You are my dearest friend.”

 

He drifted over the bed, clearing the front of the robe onto Genji’s waist. Genji laughed at the fishy glimmer of his cock in the morning. Bars of green light dappled the lateral lines. Zenyatta extended his wet fingers, and Genji nuzzled them clean.

 

“Thank you,” he echoed, droplets rolling off the textureless sheen of his mask.

 

Zenyatta withdrew his lattice of paneling and stuck the dark lips of his emergence slit onto Genji. His body paced backwards into a thunderstruck curve while the ninja hissed at him from the sheets. Finding his way down again, Zenyatta gripped the points of Genji’s waist, sinuating atop him, splashing himself across the incandescent wick until the complaints moistened to a plaintive gurgle.

 

He hung low afterwards, spitting into the air with his own frail venting. “Take it out,” Genji demanded as soon as he recovered his voice, visor aflame.

 

Zenyatta folded his palms down the flat of his pelvis, focusing on driving his penis from its envelope of silicone to meet its partner. Bands of fluid wedded their sparring crowns. He became aware of Genji moving with great purpose beneath him: posing his hand on the mattress for leverage, bunching his legs. Zenyatta tracked the staging of the coup with slight sparrow twitches of his head. Genji lunged his entire muscular bodyweight into the dismount, the conversion of their balance.

 

Golden arms met his challenge. A thicket of shining wrists bandaged his elbows and dismantled his strength. Glowing irons lined him back to the sheets. Fingers twined with his against the mattress. Unoccupied mudras cycled wide over the victory, abandoning opacity as they spread on Genji’s bare chest. Genji inhaled and translucent palms threaded into his heart. Green indicators flickered across his entire body. Zenyatta freed the first cry with a crook of his golden finger.

 

Feathers of warmth wound out of Genji’s chest and filled his neck, sweeter than any saltwater. He connected from one seam to the next joint in vibrant trembling. He dug a helpless heel on the bed, lost to any advantage he once had. Zenyatta stooped to kiss him, two hands held before his chassis in a simple line of prayer. As the asymmetries of their designs brushed together, Genji realized that even without his assisting touch-- today Zenyatta was already hard.

 

He was leaned onto his side, hand latching to the liquid white of the bedsheets. Zenyatta straddled one of his legs, sheathing the other over his shoulder. Genji lifted his head, the jeweled knife of his own cock catching his attention as it stood ferocious between folds of complementing, reflecting emerald silk. Somewhere beneath the pile of undone robes, Zenyatta’s slight gray pressure blotted his entrance, and Genji leaked again, tears of him falling down his robes. “Come on,” he urged, and a supple current down Zenyatta’s back stroked him in.

 

Zenyatta mushed his face into Genji’s armored calf. Genji laid his head down on his shoulder, and as the smooth foundation of Zenyatta’s pelvis connected with his rump, he allowed himself to exhale. “Slow,” he breathed, and Zenyatta pulled out of him by reverent centimeters, circling his hips around to enter again.

 

“You are very strong today,” Zenyatta told him as he built his mechanical body into serpentines. Genji shaded a hand against his headguard instead of replying, peeking from underneath at Zenyatta’s face. To Zenyatta, it was always new. His leg tingled where the monk’s cheek bobbed unconscious tattoos along the side of it.

 

“You’re warm,” he moaned finally, outlining Zenyatta’s form with hungry clutches. Bent hips full of pressure, legs lifted apart in a prism, his thighs went numb as Zenyatta pinned him open. Genji extended his hand. His right arm was not completely free of his sleeve. The cloth twisted at his elbow as he and Zenyatta wrapped around each other. They rocked in their cradle in the sun, oozy joins of silicone muting on the sheets, squeaks of metal and plastic playing in the wind.

 

The slant of a headguard tracked the dip of a golden jaw. Blue lights blinded the numbered stencil of a chrome breastplate. Hands clutched under silver armlets, and hands stippled the trunks of faded brown legs. He was able to hold onto Zenyatta’s back and undulate on his lap. Zenyatta kissed his fingers and a current of weightlessness coursed up his abdomen. A slender waist roped in red canted atop him, adjusting trajectory. The wind brought Genji a taste of reedy iodine, and water no one could drink. Daylight reflected from the solid body above him. Even this close, his mind did not break to some hazy flyaway dream, or stray into a memory that was not his. He did not know how to describe this newfound clarity to Zenyatta. He did not know if Zenyatta ever saw any of the things he did. His back tightened, and all of Zenyatta’s hands flowed toward the spot like luminous remora.

 

His reflection on Zenyatta’s face phased, color balancing to the monk’s freeing blue.

 

“Zen,” he mumbled, and Zenyatta calibrated again, arching faster into him. That must have been what he thought: that Genji wanted more. It was true. Genji’s tummy was hot, slightly charged somewhere below the plate. Glowing segmentation glimpsed in and out of view past his stomach, the turquoise more intense in the seams. But he gripped spine-wrapping cables in clumsy desperation where words would not come. Would have to apologize later-- would have to remember how to speak--

 

_Z_E_N: When I want a shapeful dream I write poetry / And when I want a dreamlike shape I paint_

 

A shiver up Genji’s torso emerged as a high, thin laugh. Zenyatta had not stopped moving, but he bent down and touched his lights to Genji’s antennae, and kissed Genji’s throat right above the crackling, stubborn synthesizer. Genji’s visor blushed, sky blue.

 

_karroten: When I want to touch your heart I write poetry / And when I want to catch your sight I paint_

“You can do me like him,” he added, from the box in his throat opened again by Zenyatta’s careful hands. Zenyatta lifted to look at him, array intense. “I know you want to.” Genji extended a hand down the front of his body, patting the boundary of his abdomen. “I like it too.”

 

Zenyatta opened inside him. The solid pole metamorphosed into a viscous fan of pressure. What he could catch sight of was moist and mobile as it overflowed around his entrance. Zenyatta’s fingers bit into his spine, relieving the initial lance of his back.

 

“Genji?” Zenyatta prompted, resting a hand on his face. Genji snarled, hooking ankles sloppily over his hips. The elbows balancing Zenyatta on the bed quaked as Genji thumped into him. He dropped into Genji’s embrace, the air sweetening with his lilted moans as he sought synchrony with the cyborg’s pace. Leaks sparkled out between the discord of their legs.

 

Genji fished beneath himself and liberated a cable, stretching it opposite his ribbon. One of his tails was charcoal, the other blood crimson. He relaxed his talons from the monk, and Zenyatta flitted loose with a hard groan. The cherry wire attracted a curious tilt of his head.

 

“Take me here too.” Genji waggled the body of the cable at him.

 

Zenyatta folded his hand to the base of his throat.

 

“Genji, I am never alone,” he began.

 

“They have many reasons to call you Master, right?” Genji interrupted. His visor cooled to green. “You can have this body, Tekhartha.”

 

Zenyatta sat back, Genji moaning fitfully as more of him poured out. He rested his hand at Genji’s solar plexus as he examined the red trail dripping across the bedsheets.

 

He unclipped the lines from his belt, scattering them down his rump onto the white fabric. With his right hand he collected his central vein, with the left he plucked Genji’s offering.

 

“Then you may have me as well,” he said, and bound them together.

 

The step to the other side was easier than Genji had ever imagined. Their wall was ankle-high, decorative, no locks.

 

He already knew Zenyatta.

 

Their systems exchanged upload and download counts, Zenyatta’s the more aggressive. Genji kept more secrets, but the data Zenyatta mapped was technical, embarrassing things like the threshold his happiness needed to cross for him to laugh aloud rather than just in his head. He did not know what importance mere numbers held.

 

A sigh sprouted into him, modeling its devastated wings around his soul. Genji seized, gasping, only for Zenyatta to bat the feeling unceremoniously down the river. Like he had taught Genji. Like he was supposed to always, for nothing could weigh him to earth.

 

“Zenyatta!” Genji clamored, covering the back of the monk’s head with both hands, visor flickering.

 

Though he had expected this feeling too.

 

Being able to see it did not mean he could change it. Only his body could do that. Zenyatta covered him fresh, and their cheeks strained past each other with a lazy spark. He lit a candle of need for Genji, and Genji drew to it as easily as any small life in a vast, uncalculated darkness. “Zen,” he cleared the air in a whine, hands dragging down a skinny but unyielding back. _samss_ glowed on his contact list. Zenyatta took the lead.

 

Genji’s visor overflowed teal, shot with waves of gold as Zenyatta’s arms posed his body. They outlined the flexibility of his spine, spread his legs, pet his throat as he threw his head back. In a worshipping sextet, they circled the center of his back. Zenyatta held his face, kissing him as his body burned. The first jade coil spiraled outward, freed by divine fingers. Tiger slashes of light-catching scales wrapped around them both. The lightning helix flooded off the side of the bed onto the floor, tip blooming into a leaf of fur.

 

A single serene palm held back the crushing designs of the emerald thorns spiking out around them. Zenyatta looked down at Genji, face dyed in shadow, eyelights armored gold. Where the dragon managed to touch him, scales stained amber. Flocks of birds sang as if taken wing afire, bodies reduced to diamonds of light suspended across the mattress.

 

Frail lizard-like crooks sprouted from Genji’s plating as the skin between grouted gold. Eviscerating nails cracked open toward Zenyatta’s many offered hands, though it was a useless effort still. He could never hold anyone with such arms; they could not support any weight. After so long the need for anything but fangs had become vestigial.

 

“Does it hurt today, my friend?” Zenyatta asked him as his tail flashed off the floor with the intention of taking a head. The whip of fire drifted to a stop at the back of Zenyatta’s neck. Genji lifted his hands and looked at them, and down his body. His face swooned to one side as Zenyatta’s unabated thrust adhered inside him, curling and moist, pumping excess lubricant onto his thighs.

 

“It does not hurt at all,” he panted. The dragon’s tail calligraphed a circle around the two of them, a gentled green wreath on the mattress. “What does that mean?”

 

“Always remember that you and I are the same,” Zenyatta’s voice floated within him. “All energy is yours if your mind is clear. I am yours.” Genji arched and spilled, a bookmark in the unhurried rise and fall of the waves without end. Heavy gold-green bonds fell apart from Zenyatta’s radiant body. Zenyatta shed his abyssal guise in turn, pointing as deep as he could and pulsing inside Genji. Each beat expanded the flower, till he finally administered his slow, steady creek of oil and nanomachines. Zenyatta sat nearly upright as he completed Genji.

 

Retracting white wires and anemone petals gelled together into a soft blue cock at the edge of Genji’s hazy indifference. He lay in the moist shambles of his robe. Wobbled his head up, and discovered his cable lying detached on the sheets. He propped one knee, but it fell relaxed to the bed again moments later.

 

Zenyatta applied an orb of light above his head.

 

“Do not be so dramatic,” Genji complained. He held his hand up to the wisp, wiggling his fingers in the heat, streams of gold pouring into his fingertips.

 

* * *

 

_samss_ remained bright on his contact list as he left the shower. It did not replace _Z_E_N._ He thought that was a good sign.

 

_karroten: Did you all sleep well?_

The Shambali responded in a semi-orderly line of cheeps. Their voices spilled over to each other though, and soon his head was full of cross-chatter and giggling, pairs and clusters of individuals circling the apparently humorous phrase _I had the same dream as you!_ Chakor responded in a small voice, _It was good._ Nhu’s status was marked with a deprecated _[AWAY]_ flag, which meant he was not to be bothered. Lumanti was not so visibly encumbered, but she did not respond right away.

 

Where was she? It was less of a morning in Nepal than Gibraltar, and she would have been done with marshaling them all through the monastery. The air was hearth-warm around her-- he felt her hands pouring over pebbly roots and potatoes, preparing them for cooking. Laying out cool paper leaves of spinach over the top. He gave her a nudge.

 

_Loch4n4: Do you think it is possible to love more than one person for yourself in your life?_

_karroten: I am the worst man to ask._ He watched Zenyatta fold robes and sweatpants into the hamper on the other side of the bedroom.

_karroten: But it must be true._

She did not ask anything more of him, and they exchanged their wellbeing wordlessly before retreating from the connection. Only then did Genji notice the name of their wayward brother had been pruned from the network.

 

Zenyatta joined Genji on the bare mattress as requested. Genji blinked down at the heavy bag he had pulled off the floor into his lap a minute earlier. He lumped an awkward shape confined in leathery flaps of cotton out onto the bed. Zenyatta’s face swung after it.

 

“I have to return that to someone,” Genji explained, and fished anew under the bag’s beaded hem. “Here, Zen.” He took out a pair of yellow pants and the folded cross of a dhoti. Zenyatta’s lights fluttered as these items piled in his lap. “Try not to ruin them right away.”

 

Zenyatta puttered to the bedside table and donned the pants while floating a half-meter off the floor. Pulling his ragged shawl from the table, he clutched it and the heart-colored dhoti to his chest, then restored the shawl to a backskirt position, arranging the dhoti protectively above it. He touched his feet into his sandals as he turned around.

 

Genji had a new loop of cloth drawn from the bag.

 

Zenyatta drifted close. Genji held out the braided canary sash. It terminated in a stack of beads, largest painted in pale kanji. Thick, blotchy knots ruined the nose. “These are from when my hands did not work,” Genji excused dryly, rubbing the embedded errors with his thumb. The rest of the braiding was neat and orthodox. “I thought you would like them just as they are, so I didn’t fix them. Just tie it so they are not out front all the time.” He shook his head, a warmer note crawling from his synth, “I should have known back then.” His hand moved to the tuft of yak feathers hanging out from the bottom of the bead hollows. “So, I made it for you,” he declared. Zenyatta turned the large bead to read the kanji.

 

_ZEN._

 

“I see you have ensured I will not lose it this time,” he bubbled with amusement. “It has my name on it.”

 

“You know what it means,” Genji admonished him. Then, gentler, “May I put it on you?” Zenyatta lifted his chin. Genji circled his waist with the sunlight cord. Zenyatta huffed as his hands withdrew. “Does it weigh too much?” Genji wondered. “In the back?” Zenyatta ran his fingers across the itchy braids Genji had hidden on the inside loop.

 

“It is your affection, and I do not mind carrying it.” He floated higher, resolute.

 

* * *

 

Zenyatta showed Genji the closet stacked with identical orange-gray shirts and sweats. Genji remained naked when they headed out to the main laboratory. The wings and staff were missing from the case at the hallway corner. No one was in the lab except Athena, who wished them good morning from a display. On the top floor Winston’s command center logged news broadcasts across a triplet of glossy monitors. The set-up reminded Genji of a more luxurious room in an empty house, far away now.

 

A battle of fork prongs versus dining china rang through a doorway downstairs. Zenyatta stiffened.

 

“Hana,” he gushed, bobbing after the noise. The way he spoke the name warmed Genji’s stomach. Laughter that rolled and crunched and dissipated into smaller, less indecent tittering beckoned from a sliding door. He had not been to this part of the Watchpoint before. It must have been a mess hall. It smelled like maple syrup and carbohydrates. Another round of laughter passed beneath the door liner, breaking into sharp relief as Zenyatta activated the access panel.

 

The mess hall was not full of soldiers, but many people lined the long tables at the center or claimed the backless loveseats by the far window. Zenyatta puttered toward a girl with wavy brown hair seated at the nearest industrial steel tabletop. The girl gulped through a plate of pancakes with nothing on them, bowls of untouched kimchi and rice flanking her plate. She offered no acknowledgment when Zenyatta sat on the bench across from hers. Dr. Zhou flickered her hand in a morse wave at Genji from the other end of the table before twisting pink-cheeked back to her yogurt cup.

 

An old man Genji remembered from Winston’s graduation sat up from a booth by the window, much quieter now than he had been then. Still big though. Still old. Genji supposed that was a terminal condition. The giant had to lean on the windowsill to get all the way up, and a young woman with auburn hair asked him if he was okay. He waved her off, grinning feistily through his white beard. He waded around the E-54 sitting in front of the table and made his way to the lavatory.

 

The E-54 had its yellow bird in one hand, and a handful of colorful kids’ cereal in the other. The bird dipped to eat, and Bastion tootled.

 

Mr. Lindholm stared at Genji from the seat across from the auburn-haired girl. Genji waved. The man wrapped his hands into fists on the tabletop around his empty, lightly sauced plate. His thick brow crushed his eyes, veins rooting down his forehead, the bottom row of his teeth gritting out between the blond complex of his beard and mustache. The girl was trying to talk to him as he vibrated slightly in anger.

 

Eventually she took notice of his dead olive eye on the cyborg at the door. She ogled Genji too, her coral lips circling in surprise. His shoulders tightened.

 

The E-54 stuck its empty hand over the edge of the table. Mr. Lindholm glanced at the movement, then glared back at Genji. Bastion whistled at him.

 

“No, no, no!” Mr. Lindholm barked, briefly drawing all eyes in the mess to his position. “You’ll just make him sick, feeding him more of that stuff!” he continued in a slightly more restrained growl. “Who gave you it anyway!? Wilhelm? It would be very like him to choose the children’s food!” Bastion beeped. The girl across from Mr. Lindholm propped her cheek on her hand, smirking at the conversation. Her focus was gone from Genji too, and it finally felt safe to move. Zenyatta waved at him from Hana’s table.

 

He had no sooner taken a seat beside his Master when a young man with metal-capped dreadlocks slid over from the prep table, a bowl of fruit in each hand. He wore a sleeveless pink shirt within a whisper of a crop top, a green pixel heart on the front.

 

“Whoa, take it easy,” he chuckled at Hana, who had not stopped eating since the two wanderers entered. “I didn’t even put the fruit on yet.” Hana unstooped her back and looked at him. He offered her the fresh, fat blueberries. She shook her head. He tried the other bowl: wet strawberries, stripes of orange giving their skins a plaid coat. She nodded. He set the bowl down and used a pair of tongs to transfer strawberries to her half-chewed pile of pancake mush. She stopped him after four. He grinned and sat down next to her, reeling in the bowl of blueberries and popping them in his mouth a handful at a time. Genji used his finger to prod a syrup thermos into Hana’s radius of vision.

 

Her large brown eyes snapped from the thermos to him, and she clamped her hand around the tin handle. She overturned the thermos and dumped three-fourths of it out over the fruit, and the boy next to her winced and smiled at the same time. Hana resumed gobbling the plate after.

 

She finished the last bites, sat at the table with a dazed look for a few seconds, then burped loud enough to echo off the mess hall’s rocky walls.

 

“Impressive,” the boy next to her praised.

 

“Ready to work?” she segued to Zenyatta, extending her finger across the table to point at his face. Zenyatta leaned forward and bowed his torso.

 

“I feel quite well today, Hana.”

 

She smiled for the first time, a little thing between her plump cheeks. Her other friend handed her a toothbrush, and she shined its vaporizing light around inside her mouth.

 

“Is this him?” she demanded in a low voice, jabbing at Genji with the butt of the toothbrush.

 

“This is Genji.” Zenyatta rested his hand on Genji’s upper arm.

 

“So you are Japanese?” Hana accused him. Genji glowed.

 

Then it was his laughter that skittered under the mess hall door. The boy at Hana’s side shuffled in contagious giggling. Hana’s eyes widened, but her mouth hung iron-still.

 

“That is the strangest thing anyone has called me in a long time,” Genji snickered. “But I guess I was born there.”

 

Hana’s accomplice perked.

 

“Oh hey,” he hummed in revelation, and held out the bowl of blueberries. “Did you want some?”

 

“They look very nice, but unless I am sharing with someone, I usually just watch. I only really eat when I am at home.” Genji’s visor softened. “Watching is enough. You are very entertaining to watch,” he informed Hana, testing the warm stroke of his voice against her.

 

“Are you a fan?” she muttered.

 

“What do you mean?” Genji asked, and her face crinkled at him, lips gawping open in a frown. She rolled her eyes back to Zenyatta.

 

“Let’s go,” she told him, and apparently all of them, because Zenyatta and the other boy got up straight away to follow her. Genji lurked after the three of them, and they entered a lounge in another hallway. Window bays lined the room. Monitors, wires, consoles, and cameras replaced the furniture, which had all been shoved against the walls. Bushels of clothing sparkled from the backs of the couches.

 

“Master,” Genji whispered as he followed the drifting monk to a divan. “Does she need a lot of help?”

 

“I am pleased to assist Hana when she is helping others,” Zenyatta corrected him. Genji crossed his arms, gazing out the window as Zen took a seat. He could not really tell where the sky ended and the ocean began. The longer he looked at it, the more beautiful it became.

 

Hana and her friend clustered by the monitors, firing up some stage lighting. A camera drone played a branded ditty as it turned on and hovered into the air, dilating its circular purple eye at the two of them. It floated to Hana’s forehead on rings of light and kissed her right temple.

 

“Athena, do you have the GPS encrypted?” she asked. The drone fluttered back to the hologram of its permitted flight path.

 

“Of course. Everything is secure,” Athena replied with her usual confidence from a speaker beside an iridescent node on the wall. “You may begin the stream at any time.”

 

“O-K!” Hana grabbed a pile of black cloth off an armchair.

 

Zenyatta tapped Genji’s elbow, and handed him the yellow sash for safekeeping. Genji watched him dispense his dhoti to a folded red square on the couch cushion. He only really registered what the monk was doing when Zenyatta carefully stripped his brand-new pants.

 

“What?” Genji’s hands rose, one empty, the other occupied with the sash braids. “Eh?” he droned weakly as Zenyatta removed his sandals. Zenyatta twisted toward the sloped arm of the divan, looking for something. He popped off his faceplate while his back was to Genji and dispensed it atop the rest of his clothes. The circuit patterns on the upturned interior of the plate shimmered. “What kind of stream is this?” Genji demanded, turning to Hana.

 

She was stripped to her underwear, the white of her body split by the dark harlequin stockings she rolled up her legs.

 

“Did you just fall out of another century or something?” she drawled.

 

“It’s a charity stream for the tsunami,” her friend informed Genji brightly. He was hopping in place to get his legs down some skinny black dress pants, white gloves stark on his hips.

 

“A tsunami? Where?” Genji asked. His heart was a little fast.

 

“Busan,” Hana answered. She flipped the fringe of the stocking flat on her waist and started shimmying a hilly black dress over her head. “But a lot of people don’t seem to have any awareness about it.” She wagged her finger at him through the head hole of the garment while the rest of her squirmed under the shiny folds. “It happened the same day Mondatta died.” Her various limbs erupted from the satin caterpillar and she puffed her cheeks, then exhaled as she adjusted the dress top.

 

Genji thought about the tsunami while Hana traced on her eyeliner.

 

“Was it that big omnic?” he asked.

 

“Maybe,” she mumbled, tying her hair back so it would fit under a pigtailed blond wig. “But I have an alternate theory…” Hana smiled at Genji. “God hates us.” Genji blinked at her. She tied a belt of pearls around her waist. “What do you care anyway? It’s not like Japan got bothered at all. It never goes there.”

 

“It is not true, Hana,” Zenyatta said, reverbing oddly, as if he was speaking from inside a ceramic pot.

 

“Hana,” the boy beside her frowned as he buttoned up his vest. She looked at him, then turned away from Genji to tie up her lacquered bowtie heels.

 

“Hana, Hana, Hana,” she grumped at her shoes. “The Crisis brought the whole world together, huh? All those old things don’t matter.”

 

“Love brings the world together,” he answered her. She dipped her head at her work, pigtails dangling forward over her shoulders.

 

“You’re right,” she said, dropping her shoe straps to tip a little heart in front of her chest.

 

“I agree, too,” Zenyatta burbled in his weird hollow voice again. Genji turned around.

 

A pumpkin-shaped head with bushes of white hair on the sides creaked toward him, black doll eyes fixed on his face.

 

Genji sat down on the divan, and leaned up to the curly mustache and tapered beard. Zenyatta strapped a belt across his gold-buttoned jacket. His omnic spheres were set aside in a tight ring over his previous faceplate.

 

“Master…” Genji touched the mustache with two fingers. It was stiff white plastic. The mask had a carved jaw hinge. He propped his fingertip on the corner. “How will anyone know how you feel, with a face like this?” The jaw swung open, and there was a wooden space painted reddish-pink inside, an eternal scream.

 

“I am happy,” Zenyatta proposed of this expression. Genji’s fingers wandered under the upper row of hard wax teeth. The inside of his mouth was grainy even through the pink paint. Thumbing his chin, Genji probed deeper.

 

“Zenyatta, I need you now,” Hana called. Zenyatta turned his head away from Genji’s hand, his jaw snapping shut like a mousetrap. Genji jumped.

 

“Cute…” he oozed as Zenyatta cranked a decorated stovepipe over his peach dome. The disguised monk floated out to Hana, ponytail wagging behind him.

 

“He isn’t good at acting,” Hana said. Genji’s eyes lifted from the red bow fastening the tip of Zenyatta’s hair to the cat-ear headband she buckled over her wig. Hana drew two big curves up from the corners of her flat lips. “For the stream, you need to be happy.” She dropped her hands to her hips. “Besides, he has to match at least a little.”

 

Zenyatta turned around next to her, facing Genji with the same confident, bent elbow pose. Genji twitched where he stood. Zenyatta’s jaw worked open slightly in question. Genji darted over and hugged him, burying his face in his tasseled shoulderpad. One arm locked around Zenyatta, he fumbled the other out blindly to Hana, clutching onto the lace and skin at her collarbone. Her eyebrows hooped up her face, then she smiled, shading her eyes at the floor until Genji let go.

 

Hana, Zenyatta, and the boy-- _Lúcio_ , Zenyatta informed him --sat together on sequined purple cushions in front of the main monitor. Genji perched cross-legged on the side. He reached for Zenyatta’s ponytail and played with the imitation fuzz at the end, a constant wiggle terminating off-camera.

 

“I will not be able to assist you tomorrow,” Zenyatta said as Hana calibrated the audio of the holographic soundboard on Lúcio’s arm, a headphone in one ear. “My student will want to leave, as I told you before.” Zenyatta’s hair slackened back into the camera pane. Hana hissed through her nose.

 

“There’s a mission soon anyway,” she noted, not to be defeated as her eyes flashed toward Genji. “You know there’s no use in getting all sentimental,” she continued, and Genji raised his head. “Doing something just for your emotions is selfish.” Her heart-shaped face turned on Zenyatta. “Don’t you think so?”

 

Zenyatta curled a finger against his chin, pinching an elastic fleck at the top of his beard.

 

“Master does not believe emotions are useless,” Genji supplied in his stead. “Just that if improperly managed, they can distract us.”

 

“That is exactly what I’m saying!” Hana snarled.

 

“Anger is an emotion,” Genji observed.

 

“Yeah,” she spit through her teeth. “Like the only useful one.”

 

He sighed, and Lúcio chuckled at her other side.

 

“Guess you haven’t met her before,” he offered. “I mean, some people haven’t.” He slid a smooth grin at Genji from beneath his shaded specs. “She’s pretty niche.” Hana flapped her elbows in protest. Lúcio keyed a few of the sliders on his soundboard, holding a much larger and more specialized earpiece than hers and bobbing his head to the beat.

 

The rhythm slowed. He flipped his shades up at Genji. “You totally know who I am though, right?”

 

Genji considered him. Lúcio sat back on his hands, mustering a careless grin, waggling his eyebrows. When Genji did not say anything right away, he scratched beside his ear and cleared his throat. “I think that, uh, happiness, is really a meaningful emotion. Part of a balanced life is to be happy more than you are anything else. Not happy forever, that’s a little creepy, but content. Positive, right?” He lined the side of his hat with his gloved fingers and tipped it to Genji.

 

“I do not know who you are,” Genji said. He did remember a tattoo on the young man’s bicep, covered now by his white sleeves. “You are a frog boy.” He looked at Zenyatta’s static grimace. “And happiness over everything else is not balance.”

 

“W-wow,” Lúcio peeped, eyes wide and glossy.

 

“Quiet,” Hana commanded. “We’re starting in ten.” The lounge windows redecorated with historical footage from the Philippine tropics. Bright rhythms spangled the air from the soundboard. Hana counted down in Korean, and eyes blazing, finished with “BLAST-OFF!”

 

The purple-eyed camera drone fixed its eye into a point, and the spotlights around the trio adjusted their illumination: dramatic white across Hana’s face, Zenyatta keyed in cool pink beside her to set off the rosy paint on his cheeks. Lúcio, still weepy, in lilypad green. “Hello world!” Hana shouted, and Zenyatta’s bobbly head tilted toward her. “I am here with my DJ Lúcio…” Her lips coiled in a feline smirk. “You might have heard of him. And my special guest Nutty is here too for another day of our charity challenge!”

 

Genji could not see the main feed from his angle. He scooted his seat closer to Zenyatta, and leaned in front of him to check the viewer count. The number did not make any sense. It was in the millions. He noticed his visor peeking green onto the feed just as Hana planted her glove on his headguard and shoved him away. “GET OFF THE CAMERA!”

 

The chat on one of the holoscreens flanking the monitor frenzied as Genji pulled himself up.

 

_YoshBoy3201: WHO IS THAT_

_Ruro9: I didn’t give you permission to get a new boyfriend Hana!_

_edison: Omnics kidnapped our D.Va!_

_weepoopoo: I still ship Hana X Nutty…_

_qqLazerBum: The Russians?!?!_

_2309168: We’ll free you D.Va! Chat power go!_

Several million people began to copy and paste the line _FREE D.VA_ over and over again. Some posted screencaps and vids of Genji’s partial appearance. Others, crying emojis. Hana glowered at Genji as he sat placidly in his corner. _D.VA IS CRYING_ became the new copy-paste in the chat, mixed with the echoing trails of _FREE D.VA._

 

“Be calm, my friends,” Zenyatta said, wiggling his fingers at the camera. _NUTTY IS CRYING_ replaced _D.VA IS CRYING_ in the chat. A paragraph-long text pasted by several users accused Nutty of being a secret agent collaborating with the Siberian omnium to kidnap Hana. _Wake up!_ it said. _No one is as nice as Nutty IRL!_

“Listen up!” Hana announced. “Today I am playing Starcraft 2! My opponent will be the famous world champion…Mr. Song!” A man with a streaked gray beard wearing a leather jacket and an omnic in a padded red robe like a cartoon emperor appeared in a new holo over Hana’s main monitor. Small insectoid lights dotted the omnic’s face, but no eyeslots and a low jaw. “My super cool friend Thespion will be interpreting for him, so be nice to them both!” Hana said. The man on the new screen muttered in Korean. Thespion watched him carefully, and when he finished speaking, struck a dramatic pose with his hand keyed under his rectangular chin.

 

“Ahhh it’s true!” Thespion translated in a thunderous voice. He held up his hand and folded in his thumb. “I’m number one! Many people think my tiny daughter, whom I love with all my heart, is very skilled at Starcraft 2. But let it be known!” He crushed his hand into a fist and raised it. “She has never once beaten me at Starcraft 2!” The chat went into shock. “Yes, it is her worst secret! Perhaps today she will honor her country and finally defeat her amazing Papa in a match!” Thespion lowered his voice to a silky growl, snaking toward the camera with all his lights tuned up. The man beside him shook with laughter. “But I think it is unlikely,” Thespion whispered to the stream. He exhaled deeply and sat back, speaking now in a conversational tone, “Remember to donate according to who you think will win. If you think Mr. Song will win--” He put his arm around the older man. “Your donation color is orange. If you think Hana will win--” He flashed his hand toward the camera. “Your donation color is purple. There are no ties! We will play until victory is decided!” His pitch brightened even further. “It is just my kind of match!”

 

“Lúcio has more samples from his newest album for our party music,” Hana said, and Lúcio waved. “In the breaks, Nutty will translate your questions for me and Mr. Song. Write only with love!” she stressed, making another heart in front of her chest. “Now, let’s go, Papa!”

 

“O-K!” Mr. Song and Thespion shouted at the same time. Mr. Song lifted his eyebrows at Thespion.

 

“I am really into this!” Thespion squeaked.

 

Genji watched the production. Hana and her father had occasional exchanges in Korean, which fell upon Thespion and Zenyatta to translate for the audience. Thespion dramatized the mumblings of the human at his side; Zenyatta delivered all of Hana’s words in his own serene decanter. Thespion boxed the air, bouncing in his seat on Mr. Song’s side. Lúcio mostly ignored the game screen, grinning as he tweaked up the music floating behind the sound effect explosions and screeches.

 

A black cat and white rabbit in dresses popped onto the main monitor framing text in a few languages: _BE RIGHT BACK!_ Hana sagged on her cushion, flopping her tongue out of her mouth as she sighed. She patted her cheeks, looking around the area. Mr. Song said something on the second video and she nodded, scratching the edge of her wig. She chopped her hand at Genji, continuing in Korean for a bit. Genji hefted his chin up.

 

“I told him you’re my water boy,” she said. “Water boy, go get me a water bottle!” Her voice rose, and Genji shuffled to his feet, brushing off the front of his legs. “You’re doing so good today!” She had already moved onto Zenyatta, hugging him tight. “You’re uh…plucky!” Zenyatta murmured his gratitude in Korean, holding Hana loosely so he did not rumple her dress. Genji headed for the door.

 

He took a different route back to the mess, trying to familiarize himself with the Watchpoint’s rooms. He could only remember the medbay, interrogation…maybe it was all in a different part of the facility. He could not remember anything with windows from back then, and here they were behind every door. He passed aquatics, the sun so high the water blazed white.

 

A ripple in the glow halted his step. He hovered in the doorway, peeking at the strange geometries unfolding across the water. There was a steaming mug at the edge of the pool. He could see the teabag sticking out, smell the processed cardamom. It was hard to detect anything else over the chlorine.

 

_Genji._ The mermaid called him in.

 

She took another lap while he walked over, before submerging to glide the length of the pool and up through his reflection. Crossing her arms in front of his perching toes, she smiled up at him.

 

“It is relaxing, isn’t it?” Angela Ziegler sighed, and corralled her mug for a sip.

 

“Are there no beaches nearby?” he asked.

 

“I guess there might be. This is just more convenient,” she chuckled, flicking two fingers through the water. “And heated.” Maybe it was the way the light here caught her face, but her cheeks looked rounder, her hair thick and pale in its tie behind her head. Hardly a bag under her eyes, and the scars over them were heresy by now. She did not seem five years different. Did people get more beautiful as they aged? He could see it, maybe a little in her hands since she was not wearing her gloves, her veins blue candlelight over her bones. “You seem well, Genji,” she said, the deep sky of her eyes lifting from the soft green keystone of his chest to his face. Genji abandoned his tentative roost to cross his legs, sitting before her.

 

“You too, Angela.”

 

She smiled, but covered her mouth like it was a cough. Looking into her tea, she abandoned that expression.

 

“You have my condolences,” she continued. “I am sorry that Amélie has continued to be such a burden.” She slipped her arms from the side of the pool, and floated limbless, just shoulders and hair and eyes in the water. She wore a blue swimsuit with a white stripe down the left breast.

 

“My family is doing much better now,” he offered, and she nodded. “Master is recovering too.” Her smile came back.

 

“Hana really made him into her project,” she reported with a thick fondness.

 

“Did you talk to him too?” Genji asked, and her eyes widened.

 

“I did.” She sank to her nose for a moment, surfacing to elaborate: “But we try to stay formal. Like colleagues.”

 

“Hm…” Genji rested his hands down on the pool edge, one finger almost tripped into the water. Angela watched it. “Hana and Lúcio are both so young. Like Zen.” She laughed at him.

 

“You’ve only got a decade on them Genji.” Her eyes shaded. “Or so.”

 

“I was just wondering how young they were when Overwatch took them,” he explained, holding out his arms, his shadow grown over Angela in the pool. Her eyes traveled blankly after him as she thought. She stiffened.

 

“They were never in the original organization.” She lifted her shoulders in entreaty. Drops of water winked from her skin like the round eyes of a fly. “They are volunteers. They contacted Winston after the museum mission got some publicity. You might say they grew up with the idea of Overwatch, though. They remember some of the better things it did.”

 

Genji exhaled deeply, surprised by his own relief. He stuck out his hand. Angela blinked at the watery reflection tangling across his metal fingers. She stuck her snow-white fingers out of the pool. He pulled her onto land and rose to find her a towel. When he returned she was rubbing her hand, her feet hanging in the water. She doused her face behind the white terrycloth and squeezed out her hair. Genji watched the water darken the fabric. He snickered, and the wings of cloth jiggled toward him a little. “I brought paper. I finally got some from the monastery.” Her face surfaced from the towel only to smile uncertainly. “For the letter I was going to write you,” he prompted. “Since that is what you enjoy most.” Angela’s eyes searched the empty space between their hips.

 

“Of course,” she confirmed after a moment.

 

“But you are right in front of me, Angela,” he chuckled.

 

“You could probably write it and send it off,” she said, looking toward the windows as the towel cascaded off her hair to wrap her shoulders. “And by the time it gets to me, we will be far from each other again.” Her pupils tightened and she turned back to him. “That probably didn’t come out the way I meant it.”

 

“You are not staying here?” Genji inquired, calming his voice as he spoke to her, leading her back to her own peace.

 

“I told Winston I would help with the mission coming up, but I am trying not to make it a full-time occupation,” she sighed, chest shrinking at how easy he could guide her. “I’m not sure letting other people tell me what to do with my talents is the best idea.” Angela withered a grin. “Though Winston seems very capable. With his genetic therapy, he might be even smarter than I am.” She giggled at the idea.

 

“I will write you when I am in Japan then,” Genji said. “I will buy a cherry blossom envelope. It will be so obnoxiously pink, you will know it is me.” He formed a heart symbol in front of the ring on his chest, like Hana. He tried cocking his head like her, but corrected his posture when he noticed Angela staring, her mouth a pouting line.

 

“It is an unnecessary risk,” she stated. She really had talked with Zenyatta. Genji cast his head to the side, less playfully.

 

“Such is life.”

 

“He is a killer.”

 

“I suppose that is the part of him I know best.”

 

Angela bit her lip. Anger made her look human.

 

Angela lodged her hands on the tiles and pushed herself up, dripping over to a bench at the wall. She came back with a memory stick in her hand. The unit retaining data was microscopic, but it had an orange handle and hologram projector so humans could use it. There was an Overwatch decal on the top, but she scratched the sticky white print off with her nails before she handed it to him.

 

“This is everything Athena and I could find. So you know what you are getting yourself into.” She sat cross-legged next to him this time, letting her feet dry. Genji opened his arm and stored the memory stick there.

 

“It wouldn’t be any fun if he had lost his edge.”

 

“Since I cannot stop you…” She glared at him. “I want you to understand something: Talon is the one that takes. And no one that gets involved with them ever comes back.” She read her manifesto like a medical chart, blue irises glazed.

 

“That is why I must go. I must ensure it is his own choice.”

 

“You mean, ‘stop him’.” He noticed a faint purple edge to her eyeshadow, like the grading of ocean light into the depths. Her eyelids wrinkled at the bottom as she watched him, but no tears. To humans his face was not forgiving to nuances of expression, so he shrugged. Angela closed her oceanic eyes.

 

She reached out to him, uneven, patting at his bicep. He unfolded his legs, heel bobbing on the pool water as he ducked a hearty embrace around her. Angela figured her role out then, crooking her arms across the broad span of his back, hands spreading on his unbreakable armor. She held her breath when he put one hand on her spine. Waterproof daffodils fragranced her hair. She was the first to let go.

 

The hooks of his chrome breastplate snagged against the stainless cross around her neck as they parted. “It’s nothing,” she excused before he could speak, smoothing her hand down her front. “God be with you, Genji,” she bade to him as he got to his feet. When she smiled at him, her face was tranquil once more.

 

After he left, he heard her drop back into the water.

 

* * *

 

“What took you so long?” Hana shook her head as Genji offered her water he had poured into a stone coffee mug. “I should have asked for a soda.”

 

Zenyatta was parsing through several million lines of tagged questions on one of the holoscreens. His toothy, bearded face swiveled its grotesque smile at Genji, chat lines continuing to stream past, reflecting on his wooden cheeks.

 

“You must tell me, my student,” he chirped. “Is this the Overwatch you remember?”

 

Genji looked around the room, and budged onto the cushion next to Zenyatta. He put an arm over Zenyatta’s frilly red shoulders. Zenyatta closed his jaw.

 

“Maybe it is different,” Genji ventured. “Now that all those old warriors are dead, and Winston is finally in charge.”

 

“We’re back online,” Hana said as she sat down in the center. “You should get out of the way.” But she did not push him off. She brought the water he had brought to her lips with both hands, and sipped at it like a teacup.

 

* * *

 

The shuttle skimmed across wheat heads like a crashing weather balloon, settling its bulbous cream and orange bulk to a patch of untilled dirt lining the fence. A road ran by at the left, but it was a deserted worm of holographic markers at this hour. As Genji walked down the deploy ramp, he tuned his nightvision to the crops. Despite her athletic landing, it did not look like Athena had disturbed any of them, not any more than the strong wind blowing up the foothills from the south.

 

“There is an abandoned train station closer to the village we could use,” she proposed from her speakers. “Your walk time will be substantial.” Zenyatta floated down the ramp and joined Genji at the bottom.

 

“We are not in any hurry,” Genji said. He looked at the shuttle’s nose. “Tell Winston I will pay him back for my thievery.”

 

“He will appreciate that, though it is not required,” Athena reported. Genji tilted his head. “You are his friend.” Genji looked at Zenyatta for advice, but Zenyatta was gazing across the road to the untended fields on the other side, watching the grass swing in the night breeze.

 

“Okay,” Genji grunted. “Thank you too. You always have to chauffeur.”

 

“Oh you are very welcome, though it is not even an octadecimal of my resource load. And Zenyatta is with you…he is very much my friend.” Zenyatta did not even turn around at his name. “Contact me when you are ready to return.” Athena flicked her jets, and the shuttle streaked to invisibility among the stars.

 

“Are we going there first?” Zenyatta asked when she was gone, his head twisting a blue flashlight at the nearest mountain.

 

“This bag is really heavy,” Genji admitted. “I would like to be free of this burden.”

 

A young tomcat hopped onto the farm fence and followed them as they walked, always a few dainty paces behind, eyes a couple tiny moons over Genji’s shoulder. Genji did not mention the little ninja to Zenyatta, and when the fencing ended the cat sat down at the edge of his territory to watch them brave the wilderness beyond.

 

The swollen moon painted hazy behind the mountain peak, the sky crawling with seed parachutes and silky trains of pollen. Cricket chatter fell away as they climbed the mountain, and the singing and snarling of unseen birds flew from the vegetation growing around them. When they arrived at the tallest, blackest doorway to the forest, Genji took Zenyatta’s hand and they walked beneath the trees together.

 

Genji abandoned his monochromatic nightvision. Ancient bark whispered in irregular halos around the two of them, framed by the passage of their blue and green light. Zenyatta pivoted toward a pile of dark leaves kicked apart by Genji’s foot, toward a tree with ebony bark that stood thirty meters high and rooted in vast ripples around its trunk, toward the wraiths of feathered insectoid movement in the shadows past their heads. Genji turned only for the crunch of underbrush beside him, his green cast falling across Zenyatta’s feet planting to the ground, sandal heels grinding on the soil. Zenyatta peeked down his front at his toes, his free hand curling up in a fist by his shoulder. Genji was careful not to laugh.

 

Still, they attracted attention. A black moth flapped around a tree by Zenyatta, bobbing and falling unevenly on the mulchy odor of the wind. Moonlight never made it through the trees, but it glowed off the back of the moth’s wings, and half of each wingbeat gleamed with blue-white lightning as it flew. Genji ducked his head, watching it closely. However random its windy flailing seemed, each of its little spirals revolved the moth ever closer to the monk. It landed weightlessly on Zenyatta’s raised hand while he was still gawking at his feet.

 

Zenyatta gasped, face rising swiftly to his guest. He turned his hand, and the moth shuffled its many legs to maintain its perch. It cut the leaf of its wings open, luminescing metallic white from its back as its bushy antennae tickled Zenyatta’s eyeslots.

 

Genji released Zenyatta’s wrist.

 

“Stay close,” he said. “You could get lost otherwise.” Zenyatta nodded to him. It was easy enough for Genji to track his footsteps anyway, plundering through the dirt like a little kid. By the time the river’s voice grew strong, the moth had disappeared from Zenyatta’s hand. The first color to distinguish itself from the shade of the forest’s joined canopies was the safety orange of Overwatch hazard tape. Genji took a couple blue trash bags from the top of his belongings and handed one to Zenyatta. Unlike the tape, the bags confessed to their origins with circular logos on their sides.

 

Genji and Zenyatta traveled the treeline and dismantled the shiny plastic intestines quartering the graveyard. Genji pinned the trash under a tree root for later retrieval. He unshouldered his beaded bag and pivoted out the bandaged weight that had distorted the stitching since Nepal. The cracked stone eyes of the wolf glowered free as he undid the loops of paper. He looked across the choppy mounds split and robbed. Zenyatta pointed down the line of statuettes at other graves long bereft of form, the ground beneath them special only because a wolf watched over it. Genji set his guardian at the first empty grave and left it at that.

 

He let Zenyatta lead where he pleased, and they crossed the beach toward the wide river splitting the forest. Genji noticed a soggy pack of synthetic cigars lodged in a clump of pearly reeds and took it out to the trash. When he returned Zenyatta was sitting in the shade of the weeping tree, and looked out to him through the swaying ribbons of leaves, a few of his fingers sunk in the cool sand. Genji hunched next to him, visor blinking out at the bubbling current.

 

Zenyatta exhaled like he was pressing lips together, a voiceless _oooo._ Genji patted his shoulder.

 

“You like this place? Too bad it is such a mess,” he whistled. Zenyatta shook his head, hands craning across his knees, connecting thumbs and pinkies with the other fingers slightly angled.

 

“What is on the other side?”

 

Genji examined the river and the silver knolls of the far bank.

 

“Just the wolves, like I told you.” He rolled his shoulders. “Or like my father told me.” He flumped on his rear in the sand. “This is a nice spot though.” He lined to Zenyatta’s back and they sat facing the south and north of the river. Genji circled his paired fingers up under his chin and sighed, Zenyatta echoing the noise at his back.

 

It was dawn before either of them moved again. Genji first, following the string of gold up the water and across the white curtain of the falls. “Well, Father is dead,” he announced to the sun. Zenyatta lifted his head. Genji felt the movement along his own neck.

 

“We may wait here, if you would like to,” Zenyatta offered, voice smoothing around the back of Genji’s head to his ears.

 

“It might be bad if he came. He might kill us for trespassing,” Genji explained, pointing at his mask even though Zenyatta could not see him do it.

 

“Oh.”

 

“But more likely…we would frighten him off.” Genji looked to the top of the waterfall. “That is what animals are like, isn’t it? I know a good place to stay though. He doesn’t know about it. It is mine.” He got to his feet and used his arm to hold the tree back as he ducked out onto the beach. Genji turned south, sizing up the flat of sand, and beckoned Zenyatta up with a lift of his chin. “Just one more thing to do here.”

 

Zenyatta drifted out into the sun, lowering his head in a flinch from the light. He touched Genji’s back to encourage him onward. The shadows of many other arms dropped from Genji’s shoulders and spine when Zenyatta let go. With the monk ever beside him, Genji visited the two graves piecemealed together in the south, far from all the rest. The gnarled weeds serving as their markers had merged into a single tree of many branches, the air around it studded by blue flies gleaming like free-floating omnic lights.

 

Genji considered the undisturbed mound on the left.

 

“You should not withhold,” Zenyatta told him. “Expressing yourself does not discount other honors. Your gestures are empty only if you feel they are.”

 

Genji took a stance before the sunlit grave and placed his hands together. He scrutinized the alignment of his fingers, and then in a couple of stiff tries, bowed his head.

 

Zenyatta said nothing when afterwards he dropped to his knees and dug his old sword from the grave on the right. Wrapping the fractured blade in nanofiber, Genji packed it with the others on his back. He rocked back into seiza, Zenyatta’s shadow hovering on the ground beside him, overlapping his father’s grave.

 

“I must ask something of you,” he told the monk. Flies landed on the corners of his visor to determine if there was anything worth dabbling their sucker mouths through, glowing on him like new eyes. “Though I do not know if I have the right. Maybe it does not have any meaning if I demand it.”

 

“What do you wish of me, my friend?”

 

Genji tilted his right arm up, snapping the cover that protected his shuriken from the elements. He ran his ring finger over the memory stick, then pinched deeper to pull Winston’s transmitter from the iridescent fibers holding it in place. He held it out to Zenyatta, who took it and ticked his head at it as it rested in his palm.

 

“When I die, you must continue just as you are. You must keep helping lost souls like me. And when your brothers and sisters call for you, you must never turn them away or remain silent. Saving others is the only way you can honor me.” Genji looked up in mischievous green. “I will allow you to cry, but only with joy. For my life has been wondrous because of you. And maybe it is true-- one day I will find you again. But unless you are strong, I will not know who you are.”

 

“Focusing on anything but the life in front of you is not a path we should take,” Zenyatta said, but Genji cooled at him. “You speak as my brother did,” he added, in a deeper note. “What you ask is something I can do.” Genji switched bright as Zenyatta folded the transmitter to his wrist.

 

“Good!” he praised. “Now I have no regrets in visiting Hanzo.”

 

“You are mistaken, my dear one. He will not defeat you.”

 

“You speak like you saw it in a dream,” Genji taunted him.

 

The river churning at their backs in a listless gray rain, they left the forest behind and headed along the flank of Hanamura village, on the roads no one used. Zenyatta looked out to the skyscrapers as they passed. The route took them into another night. In the morning they walked on a grass-riddled road up another hillside, metal bodies inconspicuous beneath the patterned shade of a shorter, greener forest.

 

Genji led Zenyatta up Aoyama Mountain. There were not too many cherry blossoms here, and the air was warm and fragrant with wildflowers. “I guess this is a pretty country,” he allowed as they moved through the spring wood, past tumbled and broken spirit houses.

 

The garden curled black and dry across gray soil, emaciated arms snared in the stepping-stones to the front shutter. Nothing lit up when Genji walked into the atrium. An unpaid electrical bill from the Tokyo energy conglomerate was posted on the wall, along with a seemingly unserved legal notice about some kind of tax evasion. The storm shutters had fallen in on the outer corridor. The entire back wall of the bedroom lay collapsed, full of bird nests and weeds growing through the moldy tatami.

 

It did not seem like it had been so long ago. The kitchen window was broken, and in the pantry all the whiskey bottles were empty on the floor. Genji took the memory stick from his arm and set it to one side, Zenyatta’s lights glowing after it. He put his bag and swords on the lowest shelf.

 

He went outside and located the generator lurking outside the laundry room. After brushing off its coat of crinkled leaves and prying open the solar panels, he plugged it into the house. Zenyatta found some brooms in a closet and they swept out the hallways, standing the outer walls up even if some of the screens had mouse holes in them. Genji folded the tatami one by one, taking them out to the trash bin and piling them atop the blue bags. He rolled the bin to the tip of the cul-de-sac, and left it there with a shrug at the empty road. He insisted to Zenyatta he did not need any more help cleaning, and Zenyatta wandered off behind the house.

 

Genji discovered him later at the hot spring, meditating in the steam and sunset. Two white monkeys sat in the water nearby, grooming each other and sniffing dismissively at Genji with their pink noses. Genji joined his Master, and when they rose again the unlikely simians were gone.

 

They returned to the house, and Genji imagined sleep, though they had no futons or anything else that would make the dwelling livable. Zenyatta made love to him on the exhausted, empty garden bed, and Genji fell asleep there, in that soft place under shooting stars and distant, fading dragons. The next morning was more of the same, though it was out in the forest, in a clearing. Everywhere but inside the house seemed to be fair game. The form of their connection did not seem to matter, though every time Zenyatta gave up his cabling almost at the first kiss.

 

_karroten: Did I make you nervous?_ He asked the question virtually because his mouth was occupied, though he supposed it made no real difference to his synthesizer.

_karroten: You will be okay waiting for me here?_

Zenyatta acknowledged with a trembling lilt of his faceplate.

 

_karroten: Light a candle in the window for me, so I know where to go._

Later Zenyatta found a tray of pastel Buddha candles and an ash-strewn lighter in the pantry. He plucked a rotund green blob from the tray with both hands.

 

His face turned at the reflective tab of the memory stick further down the shelf. It gleamed beside the beaded wall of Genji’s bag.

 

He crossed the pantry, past the old weapon haunting the lowest shelf-- the blade’s newer counterparts were gone. Setting the candle down, Zenyatta unraveled his fingers, checked the candle’s balance, and poked it a little deeper onto the shelf, but not so far that it missed the moonlight leaking through the kitchen. He brushed his hands together and picked up the memory stick.

 

23 photo files, 1 video, several multimedia text bundles. Only logged memory reads were A.T.H.E.N.A.O.S. and ZIEGLER A. Turning the stick around in his hands, Zenyatta poked the ragged scraps of the logo on the top. He could have downloaded everything on contact.

 

He carried the stick out to a countertop painted with yellow flowers and activated the projection unit. A blue-white photo materialized in front of him, filename HELIX-CTA92156-CLASSXX-0037. It depicted two figures standing on the crest of a diagonal beam, an unfinished building coiled inside a cityscape Zenyatta did not recognize. He requested the projector to zoom the image.

 

At the apex of the beam, perched like a lightning strike on the metal, was a woman whose hair roped out behind her on the wind. Zenyatta’s synth inhaled. The woman’s bodysuit squeezed to her bones, a dark cuticle waiting to shed. His hand drifted just off the naked diagonal severing her chest, and his face shifted toward the second figure. A man with a bow, the whites of his eyes reflecting as he looked to the woman for instruction.

 

Zenyatta turned off the projector. He went back into the pantry and picked up his round green candle. He placed it in the broken window and touched the lighter to the wick on the top, and a single light began to burn on the mountainside as the night closed in.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter:** You may call yourself my brother, but you are not the Genji I knew.
>   * "Dreaming is simply thinking in a different biochemical state." - Deirdre Barrett, Harvard Medical School psychologist and author of numerous works on dreams, hypnosis, and supernormal stimuli (technological stimuli that cause evolved instincts to overreact)
>   * In Nepali body language, nodding is a negative response, i.e. it means "no". Head bobbling/shaking is how you say "yes". For this story I decided that at least in situations where Genji is present, the Shambali use the more common methods of conveying yes or no that would be understandable to him.
>   * In Japanese body language, nodding may be used (along with grunted utterances like "yes" or "uh-huh") to convey that someone is listening to whoever is speaking. So if a Japanese person keeps saying "got it" after every sentence you speak to them, they are not trying to be impatient or rude! They're trying to show interest in what you say. It also means that native speakers may have a lot of pausing in their sentences, because they're expecting the other person to respond in-between.
>   * Zenyatta and Genji quote another Nepali poet in this chapter, Balkrishna Sama (1903-1981). Though primarily known as a playwright who focused on human rights in Nepal, he published a vast body of work in different media throughout his life. He was born the wealthy son of a general, but as a young man changed his surname to Sama ("equal") as a protest against the Rana regime that gained power through military dominance of the country. The notes in Chapter 13 have a bit more about the Rana regime in Nepal, or you could google it if interested.  
>    
>  The translated text of Sama's poem "When I Want a Shapeful Dream" is as follows:  
>    
>  When I want a shapeful dream I write poetry,  
>  And when I want a dreamlike shape I paint.  
>    
>  When I want you to speak to me I write poetry,  
>  And when I want you to smile with me I paint.  
>    
>  When I want to cry for you I write poetry,  
>  And when I want you to cry for me I paint.  
>    
>  When I want to touch your heart I write poetry,  
>  And when I want to catch your sight I paint.  
>    
>  When I want to die for the living I write poetry,  
>  And when I want a life for the dead I paint.  
>    
>  So poetry and painting go side by side,  
>  As the very moon and her moonbeam,  
>    
>  In poetry soul is the painting  
>  and in the painting soul is the poem,  
>    
>  And so, my love, my eye is your painting,  
>  And my heart your poem.
>   * _禅_ \- the kanji on Zenyatta's sash, lit. "Zen". The three strokes on top of the second part are what let you know this is specifically a Japanese writing, and not Chinese or Korean. The history of the word Zen is a little interesting: Zen comes from China (Zen Buddhism - see last chapter's notes), but the word is based on the Japanese pronunciation of the historical Chinese word "chan-na", which itself comes from the Indian word "dhyana", referring to a specific religious meditation in Indian religions.
>   * In Korean, Hana translates to "one". So D.Va really is #1. :P But in Japanese, Hana translates to "flower".
>   * The technical name of Nutcracker's hat style is _shako_ \- the more you know~*
>   * The time difference going from Gibraltar to Tokyo is +7 hours, so when it's 2PM in Gibraltar it's 9PM in Tokyo.
>   * Japanese macaques ( _Macaca fuscata_ ) are endemic Japanese primates that inspired the famous carving of three wise monkeys who "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil". The location where they are most popularly known to take hotspring baths is on the north edge of Honshu island (Tokyo and Mt. Fuji are to the southeast).
>   * This is a pretty big chapter, but I swear there are compelling organizational reasons I stuffed all of this in one place.
>   * That said I'm very happy I got to write a chapter that has a sex scene, the Nutcracker skin, and memes as coexisting elements.
>   * Happy Retribution! I'm only sad because I don't think I can fit the events in anywhere since Moira hasn't really been an entity in this story- nevermind Genji's Blackwatch skin.
> 



	23. Hanzo

 

His parents discussed him as if he was not there.

 

“Will the rest of your family have something to say about it?” his mother asked.

 

“I am the head of my clan,” his father boasted, kissing in the cuffs of his dress shirt with canary diamond links. “My brothers do not get to tell me what to do.” He faced the mirror and held a couple different ties to his broad, unbuttoned chest. He chose the one in silver and bronze, always.

 

“Really? But you are not the eldest.” Mother dragged a comb through her birdsong voice.

 

“They know why I am in charge.” Father narrowed his eyes at Mother. She flapped her arms in mock fright, making butterfly wings of her kimono sleeves. She flew from Father and came towards him on the floor, a silk tide of lavender dragons and clockwork geta.

 

“If age is no objection…” Her white hand glided under his chin. “Hanzo, you are the new head of the family.” He fit a tin block shaped like the number nine into the green slot on his toy. Then he glanced at her. She put her hands together beside her cheek and leaned her head. Her make-up was so colorful she looked a stranger. “Mother and Father will retire and you can run everything.”

 

Hanzo ogled at the soot mascara drawing her eyes huge and smoky. Mother lowered her voice, “It’s okay.” She dipped her finger through the fresh blush lining her cheekbone, and showed him the red on her fingertip. “It is just warpaint.” She smeared some on each of his cheeks, and plucked a pocket mirror from her obi to show him his face. “Now you are pretty too,” she giggled. Hanzo raised his hands to the mineral red tiger of his own portrait in the glass. Behind himself, beyond the sway of Mother’s clothing, he noticed Father’s pale eyes fixed on him.

 

“Well?” Father inquired. “What do you think, Hanzo? Want my job?” He finished buttoning up his shirt. He grinned snarly and white, golden-cheeked beneath the bedroom lamps. Hanzo dropped his hands to his block of numbers, huffing and turning away.

 

“Sojiro,” Mother scolded, though her voice coiled around the syllables, naming her treasures. She perched her hands on her hips, confident shadow swallowing Hanzo. “He knows better than to take such an offer. He will never listen to you.”

 

“All the more reason to do it this way.” Father was a growl at Hanzo’s back. “When disobedience can kill, when our family has become so dangerous.” Hanzo picked up a block shaped into a zero. He turned an ear to Father while he rotated the grainy shape in his hands. It was made of wood, and so different from the other numbers cut out of plastic and metal. It was like the floors of these bedrooms, his parents’ and his; like soil, which he got yelled at for touching unless they were at the river. The yellow paint on the zero’s rim turned like the sun in his fingers.

 

“And whose fault is that?” Mother waltzed back to Father. She took the cologne bottle from his hand and replaced it with the red one of her liking, the one with an etched horse on the front.

 

“My mother’s,” Father proposed, and Mother scratched her hand through his long black hair as if he was a dog, or a small boy like Hanzo-- same thing.

 

Fingers tying around either end of the zero for strength, Hanzo contributed his thoughts:

 

“Brother…?”

 

“Very good!” Mother cheered, clapping her hands together for him. “Do you know what it means?” Hanzo shook his head, pushing the zero through its circuitous slot and listening to it clatter onto the pile of arithmetic inside the toy. When he looked over his shoulder, Mother fanned her hands on her stomach, but Hanzo did not feel enlightened.

 

“Well that is one vote, however ill-informed,” Father declared as he wound his tie into the lacy petals of an Eldredge knot. He sucked in his abdomen as Mother’s elbow strayed dangerously close to its soft shield of wool. His lips penned a catty simper. “You don’t want a little girl?” he suggested to Mother.

 

Mother’s painted face dimmed before Hanzo’s eyes, abandoning her halo of cheer. He twisted at her, pale with shock. Her head drooped, her dark eyes on the floor, which he had never seen her do. He tried to be like her, but he did not know if he could follow such a defeated cast.

 

“Not here,” she breathed.

 

“Eh?” Father bid her, folding his hand over the top of her wrist, closing his fingers so he could find her beneath the thick fabric.

 

“Not in this world,” Mother swore at him.

 

“Is it so bad?” he wondered, and she turned her hand up to link with his. Father leaned to her ear. “With this, you are the one making the clan angry,” he whispered, though Hanzo heard everything. “Good. I will tell the doctors. And should he be smart like…” His eyes reached out to Hanzo.

 

“Isn’t there some preparation you have to do before all that?” Mother asked, rattling her sleeve at him. “Or did I get dressed up for nothing?” Father looked down her kimono.

 

“Well, technically--”

 

Mother jumped into his arms, muffling him with her trailing cuff. Father caught her, lifting her toes away from the floor, her hair slipping inky tentacles down his arm. He carried her to the door on a swaying step, their faces buried cheek-to-cheek. Hanzo raised his voice a little, so they did not forget him. Mother smiled at him with her eyes, her mouth obscured by Father’s shoulder. Father blinked across Mother’s hairpins at him, one glossy sienna shoe out the door. “Be a good boy Hanzo,” he instructed. “Don’t cry.”

 

“Where…?”

 

“The river,” Father answered with a dismissive lidding of his eyes. Hanzo abandoned his toy and got to his feet, putting his hands on the floor to push himself straight. “But you cannot come.” Father shook his head slowly. “Not this time.” Hanzo remained where he was, hands curling to fists. Father left.

 

After a few seconds of purring and obedience from the men in the hall, Tadao entered and shut the door behind him. Hanzo rotted into a pout, the tightening scorn of his jaw budging up his round cheeks. Tadao touched a wrinkled finger to his lips, craning his head at the tapering of dress heels down the hall.

 

He walked over and picked up Hanzo, inspiring the warrior’s chubby-armed fit of protest. He carried Hanzo to the window and opened the bulletproof shutter to let the summer in. Hanzo froze, shutting his eyes as the wind blew over his face. Tadao turned down the room lights, and cicada bustled beneath every shadow. Fidgeting against Tadao’s elbow, Hanzo pointed at a chair nocked to the wall. Tadao set him down. If he stood on the seat, he could see outside, propping his arms on the sill for balance. Tadao maintained one hand on the chair post.

 

Headlights circled the castle wall and set off through the village, disappearing under the skyscrapers. Tadao poked his bald crown out the window. He looked like a monk from a picture book, except instead of dyed robes he wore a trim black suit. His clothing seemed a cruelty designed to illustrate how his hidden body drooped with age.

 

“It is a nice night. It would be easy to find the Wolf and Dragon, if a man were willing to look,” he marveled, the folded black beads of his eyes twinkling. He peeked at Hanzo, who blinked at him once, very slowly, jaw set. Tadao sighed and flipped back the corner of his jacket.

 

A gun on his waistband reflected oily trails of starlight. It did not look like the standard model Father gave the rest of them. “I had a lot of trouble getting this game from my grandson,” Tadao whined. He freed a handheld console from his pocket and gave it to Hanzo. Hanzo dropped away from the open night and sat down on the chair to play with it. “You have not told anyone right?” Tadao prodded the console’s blue clamshell. “If your mother found out…”

 

“You are not afraid of Father?” Hanzo asked, eyes tracing back and forth across the pixels on the console screen. Tadao perched his elbows on the windowsill, clasping his hands together out in the air beyond the tower.

 

“Your mother is the one who moves him to action. He is the sundew, she is the tiger. They approach prey differently.” Tadao pointed at himself. “I am the turtle!” he whimpered, holding his hands behind his head to suggest the lip of a shell. Hanzo laughed, resting his hand on the _NEXT LEVEL_. “So I always try to stay safe,” Tadao withered.

 

“I did not tell.”

 

“Thank you, Master.” Tadao ruffled his hair.

 

Hanzo knew what _grandson_ meant. Father often mentioned how disappointing it was that his mother was not around to see her grandson, and Father meant him. Grandsons were his age.

 

“Will your grandson be Father’s turtle too?” he asked.

 

“I don’t think so. His mama wants him to do foreign exchange and work in some other country. Always the women are ruining everything,” Tadao whinged to the night sky. “What did your mother do to your face, huh?” he accused Hanzo, who puffed his secret blushing cheeks, rejecting the critique. “I guess my grandson’s fate is your father’s fault too,” Tadao grumbled, though he was smiling now. “Because of him, they’ll be able to pay for something like that.”

 

Hanzo rested the console on his legs.

 

“Can you bring him here before he goes away?” he asked, eyebrows keening upward. Tadao grimaced.

 

“I’m sorry, Master. You would like someone to play with besides an old man,” he guessed, and Hanzo nodded. He offered the console, just in case. Tadao shook his head. “But my daughter is not too fond of me. I am lucky she lets me see my grandson at all. Asking her if I could bring him here…” He flailed his hands over his hairless skull. “I’d die!”

 

Hanzo sniffled. “None of that,” Tadao chuckled, setting a firm palm on his head.

 

“She will not allow him even if Father asked?”

 

“Especially him,” Tadao chittered nervously. Hanzo tried to imagine someone disobeying Father, or denying his requests. Sometimes Father offered people a choice, or asked their opinion, but nothing counter to what he wanted ever happened. Yet Tadao was stiff and stark with his conviction, so Hanzo decided not to ask again today.

 

“I think your father is up to something anyway,” Tadao volunteered through Hanzo’s curtain of disappointment. “If you can wait, he will make sure you are not alone.”

 

Hanzo huffed, but accepted the possibility that Father could even command a god to grant his wish.

 

* * *

 

Despite his best efforts, he was falling asleep when a warm blur with dark, swaying hair stepped through the shiny double-doors. Hanzo complained as the pressed wool of Father’s suit coiled around his stomach to collect him from the bench. Father retreated with a quizzical lean of his head. Hanzo pushed himself to the floor and stuck out his hand. Father smiled. The relaxation strengthened his face, like a layer of make-up, and he escorted Hanzo inside.

 

Mother _was_ asleep, crumpled on her side with her hair in her face, her arms crossed around a bundle at her chest. A flush moved through Hanzo-- he wanted to be there. Father raised his voice at the nurses in a single sharp cut, and they scattered from the room in a whirl of slippers and turquoise smocks. He led Hanzo to the bed, and bent down to take the bundle from Mother.

 

“Are you done?” Father teased the cocoon of blankets. Hanzo piqued, his scruffy black hair standing on end as the folded cotton answered in a wordless murmling. Father took a knee on the tile and presented the bundle to him. The cloth leafed out around the center, revealing a hairless red-faced demon. A wool beanie sat on his head in place of a mane. His arms and legs were all scrunched up tight to his body, like he was trapped in an egg. His head was huge. Hanzo patted around the dimensions of his own skull uncertainly. “This is important,” Father’s silken voice drew at him. He shifted the infant to the crook of his elbow and pulled Hanzo’s arms down. “Before he falls asleep.”

 

“He is asleep,” Hanzo snorted, mouth trained to one side as he scrutinized the baby’s wrinkled eyelids. It reminded him of Tadao, and by extension, a monk in his robes. Father shook his head, denying the obvious reality. He fit one of his smooth fingernails under the baby’s palm. The baby grabbed it, his eyes opening darkly, focused not on his father’s fingerprint but on Hanzo’s face.

 

“A little closer,” Father insisted, applying his free hand to the join of Hanzo’s shoulders. “So he can see you.” Hanzo did not know what to call the milky musk coming off the baby, but he could feel the heat of his body on his cheek too. He didn’t like it.

 

“Hello Genji,” he said anyway, without smiling. The baby’s eyes widened, catching more of the light.

 

Unlike Hanzo, he had Father’s gray eyes.

 

Genji grimaced, and Hanzo thought he might cry, but the expression relieved in a hiccup. Hanzo tried to sidle from Father’s connecting embrace. He did not trust this tiny peach. It seemed likely to throw up on him.

 

“It is important,” Father insisted, and captured his wrist.

 

“You keep saying…” Hanzo steeled his back and remained where Father wanted him. Father steered his fingers to the baby’s pink chest and belly. Genji narrowed his eyes. The precision of his pale irises drifted up into the air at the ceiling, and those eyes closed. Hanzo looked to Father for instruction. Father focused on the baby’s face, chewing on his own lip. Genji squeaked, bending an arm against the creased lines of his brow and nose. Father lost his clinical look and bent to kiss the brim of Genji’s cap. He covered the back of Hanzo’s head with his hand, playing with his hair as he kissed him too. Hanzo leaned into his calloused palm, falling into the cup of his warmth.

 

“ _You got tired waiting for us, right?_ ”

 

Father’s throat stirred him from the edge of dreaming. Father’s arm steadied him before he slumped to the floor. Hanzo searched through his dim surroundings, discovering his hand relaxed in Genji’s blanket, and a green dragon ringed onto his knuckles. He was not any bigger than a rubber band. Father lay golden around them both, a barely solid river beneath the ward lights. “Thank your mother,” Father instructed. “Hopefully she will not kill me for making her do this twice.”

 

“I will get around to it,” Mother rattled from the bed, mummifying her ancient curse behind her arm. “Just you wait.”

 

Hanzo flexed his fingers. The dragon shifted his little claws around to maintain a grip. Keeping one fingertip in contact with the baby’s stomach, Hanzo lifted his arm, and the dragon slid down his skin in a ropey bundle. His own blue light reflected in his eyes as he went out to meet Genji. Genji scooted forward to exchange sniffs with Hanzo’s identical snout. They wound around each other and slipped free in the space of a single breath.

 

“Is this me?” Hanzo asked, grinning.

 

“He comes from the same place as you,” Father answered.  He touched the edge of Hanzo’s hand. “He is yours.” Hanzo looked away from Genji stamping one of his glowing feet and chirping a storm. The dragons faded as he gawked at his father. “He is your baby too,” Father clarified, matching his grin. “You will help us with him, won’t you?”

 

Hanzo nodded an “mm!” of affirmation once he could shut his hanging jaw. Before now, he had no idea this was not just one of his parents’ new projects, not involving him beyond the need to observe and learn.

 

“Genji,” Mother droned, her arm seeking across the bedsheets. Father withdrew Genji’s body from beneath Hanzo’s hand, and passed him to her. Mother wrapped around Genji. Father observed this arrangement with a thoughtful downward notch of his brow.

 

“Ah, he wakes up for food,” he sighed. Mother looked only at Genji, though Hanzo stood just tall enough to peek over the bedside at her. Father caught him when he tried to climb onto the mattress, hauling him off the ground into a hug. “Are you hungry too?” Hanzo realized he was ravenous. Shading his head with one hand, Father carried him out of the room into the bright hallway. Father’s eyes slit at the nurses, who scooted back around him like so many blue mice. As he ferried Hanzo to the cafeteria, Father hummed an old song, one he said he could not teach because he did not remember the words. It was his own baby song, he confessed. Hanzo had heard him singing it to Mother’s stomach.

 

He kicked his legs when the transport grew too tedious, the line of painted animals and party hats on the pink wall too obnoxious to handle at eye-level. Father held his hand. “You are not jealous?” he asked. Hanzo did not know what he meant. “You do not want to be Genji?”

 

“I am.” Hanzo spiraled blue luminescence from his wrist to touch Father’s arm with it-- Father squeezed his wristbones, eyes wide, and the glow dissipated as Hanzo flinched. Father held his breath as he scanned the hallway. Somehow…Hanzo had disappointed him.

 

“Don’t be mad if your mother spends a lot of time with him,” he quipped as soon as he exhaled. “You still have me.” He stuck out his tongue. “Do you like him?” Hanzo looked away from Father’s funny expression, and around at the pediatric corridor he found so threatening. But he could not find anything to be afraid of.

 

“I like him Father,” he answered dutifully.

 

Father smiled down at him.

 

* * *

 

“Father.” Hanzo repeated himself.

 

The man beneath the weeping cherry teetered upright, straightening the cross of his legs in the sand.

 

“What is it?”

 

Hanzo gestured behind himself with the butt of his sword.

 

“I beat him again.”

 

Father stared at the miserable pile of Genji collapsed in the sand. He shook his head, a ripple of ebony, and turned back to the river.

 

“Go,” he breathed. Hanzo knew he meant _go again,_ even if his voice faded before he finished.

 

Still, he waited, eyes pinching in the high noon beyond the comfort of the weeper’s trailing leaves.

 

He waited for a single other word or thought from Father. But Father was silent.

 

He wiped his wooden blade on the pearl grass and turned around, taking his ready stance. Genji got up but did not assume the position of Hanzo’s smaller twin. His eyes drifted away, across the mountainous treeline of the forest beyond the riverbank. He twitched as if startled, snapping toward the water. Hanzo checked both directions and found nothing. He moved at his brother. Genji cowered from him.

 

Hanzo stumped his dull blade into the sand and grabbed the backs of Genji’s hands. They were turning white around the hilt of his sword. Genji shut his eyes, going stiff as a green sapling grown in the wrong soil. Hanzo circled the heat of his palms over him, and repositioned his thumbs manually. Genji blinked open, looking up and down Hanzo’s expressionless face. His grip loosened. Hanzo picked up his weapon and set himself back into his stance.

 

“Come on,” he ordered Genji. Genji’s shoulders hilled under his fish print t-shirt. Hanzo bunched his thighs, knee carving a stern cross over the beach. When Genji lunged, he caught him on the tip of his sword, jamming it into his belly. A thistle of saliva popped from Genji’s mouth, and he tumbled into a circle of reeds. He heaved in ugly, ineffective gasps. Hanzo pulled back to his ready position. When Genji did not rise, he bent down and parted one fist from his sword hilt to knock the back of his ribs.

 

Genji erupted in coughing, but nodded as his throat finally sucked down air. He pushed himself from the grainy battlefield, fuzzy plantheads sticking to his shorts. He leveled his sword, a line of foam oozing from the corner of his mouth.

 

He channeled through the sunlight at Hanzo. Hanzo lifted his sword edge, but Genji’s strength was enough to peel up the side toward his throat. He panned his front foot through the sand to his side, rebalancing. Genji should have noticed the rustle of earth. He stumbled under his own momentum when Hanzo evaded backwards, the sturdy blockade of him suddenly no more than a twist of ribbon. Hanzo chopped a tutorial into his shoulder, Genji’s arm shocking out straight.

 

His little brother kept his sword grip. Hanzo smiled.

 

Legs still quick, Genji withdrew to the muddy lip of the riverbank, then lashed forward on the tiger pattern Hanzo had taught him, screaming. Hanzo headbutted him out of his next attack, Genji’s thrusting swordpoint and wrist snared in the crux of his elbow. Genji yipped, losing his weapon to cover his forehead with both hands. He fell backwards onto his butt.

 

A thin track of blood pulsed into Hanzo’s eye. He lowered his sword and wiped the red off with the back of his hand. Genji squinted at the smear on his knuckles, and scampered up with a grin, readying his stance. Foolish. Hanzo mirrored him.

 

“Are you alright, Genji?”

 

They both straightened into uncertain poles of bone and bruises, eyes wide at the breach in the fight. Father’s long legs moved between them. He knelt and pulled his hands down Genji’s gritted, scratched face. “Don’t cry, sparrow,” he murmured. Genji glowered past him at Hanzo.

 

“Father, don’t interrupt,” Hanzo puffed, rubbing the side of his face. Talking to Father this way made his cheeks hot and his eyes sting. “He is not crying. If you keep worrying over him before he even gets started, he will just be a baby forever.”

 

Genji bared his teeth, but the look melted as he considered the adult knelt before him. He took a few deep breaths, and patted Father’s hair.

 

“It is okay,” he told Father. “I will beat him this time.”

 

“Such a brave boy,” Father mumbled. Genji leaned on his arm, implying his need for freedom to take the attack to Hanzo. But Father did not let him go.

 

Genji’s resolve dwindled as he peeked at Hanzo from behind the man, lips puckering in bewilderment. He put his sword flat against Father’s arm, to no effect. Hanzo frowned.

 

“Sojiro,” he commanded.

 

Wide gray circles turned over the man’s shoulder at Hanzo. Hanzo’s lip quivered. He had seen those eyes before, but not directed at him. He maintained his stance, raising his fake sword at the two of them.

 

“Hanzo,” Sojiro groaned, blinking rapidly. He freed Genji, who stood there moon-eyed. Sojiro got off his knees and went to his first son, rubbing his head. Hanzo closed his eyes. “Thank you,” Sojiro rumbled above him. “For reminding me I still exist.” Tears ran from the corners of Hanzo’s eyelids.

 

“I do not understand,” he gulped as the shadow of Sojiro’s hand lifted from him. Sojiro took a flask off his hip. Hanzo eyed the uncorked bulb, which smelled bad. Sojiro lowered it to show him the amber inside the metal casing. Then he drank.

 

“It’s poison,” Hanzo realized in a heavy pang. Sojiro smiled.

 

“It feels nice.” He backed out from between the two brothers and sat his expensive suit on a log, crossing his legs, knitting his hands over his knee. “I’m fine now.” Genji was panting visibly as he looked from him to Hanzo. Another smile from the man settled him, and he waved his sword. “Begin,” Sojiro allowed.

 

Hanzo never saw him like that again.

 

* * *

 

An old-fashioned glass window creaked upwards. Under the fountain of his hair, Hanzo’s dark eye opened wide. His hand slithered up his blue sheets and pulled out the knife from the pillow under his head. He searched through the black threads flooded over his brow, fixing on the murmur of mattress springs in a distant room. Genji had left his window open again.

 

Hanzo was up, crossing the hallway, his silhouette intersecting the silver reflections of birds and samurai trapped in frames on the walls. All the images were transplants from a room now crowded with game posters and centerfolds, but Hanzo always remembered that Genji never advocated throwing them away, like he had so many things. The heat in his belly, stoking him for so long throughout the night, died to the numb gray electricity traveling his skin. His face sought across the barred wings of a hawk as he pressed to Genji’s doorway.

 

Genji woke in a muffled bleat and Hanzo pushed on the door in the same moment, hiding the gasp of hinges in his brother’s surprise.

 

A spongy yellow-white sample of the moon broke through the open window and blanketed his brother’s bed. Someone was on top of Genji. Long black hair smothered his face. From his shadowed vantage at the doorway, Hanzo leveled his blade at the wiry assassin’s core. She sat up.

 

“Are you ready?” Sayuki asked, wiggling her hips. Hanzo lurched back out the gate, almost forgetting his footing, almost making a sound.

 

“If we get caught…” Genji frowned, his expression a dire Noh in the moonlight. Sayuki shook her head, hair shining in abyssal, cataclysmic waves. On her bare arms poking from the sleeves of her trim blue shirt, on the bent perches of her legs, she was coated by a fine sheen of sweat. She glimmered in her pale patches like a koi.

 

“If we get caught we will just run away,” she answered him. Hanzo and Genji’s eyes widened, both of them waxy and foolish.

 

“Run away?” Genji coughed, broad eyebrows screwing together.

 

“Mm-hm. I have it all figured out. Even the bank line,” Sayuki promised. “And…I got the nanos… Everything’s set.” She rubbed her arm, looking out the window. “So what is it going to be?”

 

“I can’t believe you climbed all the way up here,” Genji snickered. Sayuki canted one of her feet out, showing him her thick black knee-high with grass stains on it. He put an arm over her hip. The line of her miniskirt winged after his crawling fingertips, and there was nothing underneath. “I want to.” Genji blinked, his eyes misty. “I like you a lot, Sayuki!” She pressed a finger over his lips.

 

“Shhh.” Hanzo searched from her hand restraining Genji to the determined set of her face. “My friends keep making fun of me,” she hissed. “They laugh behind their hands at me. I can’t stand it.”

 

“You need better friends.”

 

“Like you?” She divined through the folds of Genji’s thin summer sheets, and cocked herself up onto her knees. Both of them had pink cheeks. Their leaves of color stained the blue and white of the room. Sayuki stuttered a laugh, “It is already…”

 

“Well yeah,” Genji snorted. “I am a boy, Sayu--” he brayed as she covered his mouth with her hand.

 

“You look different,” she said, tilting her face at him. “Without your make-up on.” He smiled.

 

“So do you.”

 

She sat down, and her breath bulged out of her sharp and thin.

 

“That was it?” Genji whistled as she settled flat on him, her cotton clothing rumpled around her thighs. “That was nothing!” Sayuki tipped the curve of her spine forward and back, trembling, and shut her eyes.

 

“You are such a romantic,” she whimpered. Genji gawked up.

 

“Does it hurt? Maybe we should have done more kissing first.”

 

Sayuki reminded Hanzo of a bird heaving on the forest floor, an arrow pierced through the dark skirt of her wing. She bent forward.

 

“I can handle this,” she swore, though she did kiss his younger brother again, pinning his shoulders down with her hands.

 

Hanzo retreated from the doorway. The painful blush in his cheek quieted as he held his hand over it. He looked down the shadow of his arm at the blade sprouting from the end.

 

The corpse of the Aoyama assassin lay sinking into the wall. He remembered the jet of blood streaked over the paint. That was right: _Sojiro_ had been the one that got Genji to move the paintings, helping Hanzo break up the silhouette of the hallway, ensuring he could grow beyond that moment.

 

He touched the bow of his mouth, carved his face back to its resting elegance with his fingers.

 

The man’s body had not stayed warm for very long. Hanzo grazed his hand as Sojiro got him up: cool, slick, full of heatless moonlight. Ready to fade off the floorboards.

 

Genji moaned, and Sayuki whispered him quiet.

 

Hanzo flattened his palm to his lips until they smoothed the right empty shape. He found himself staring at the dragon door joining the suite to the outside world. Orange lamplight prickled around the uneasy blots of the guards in their suits. They stretched across the floorboards and memories of the inner hallway. The sweet, dry grain of dismembered insect wings and hidden nests filled his nose. He turned, drifting cold and gray back to his room. Nothing more than moonlight, he thought.

 

Breakfast: he stared into his egg and rice, aware of a knife oozing in to snip off squares of his grilled fish tail. The gold of the sun laced Genji’s arm. He kept going, even when Hanzo leaned his cheek into his knuckles to watch him. Still a child.

 

“Sleep well?” Sojiro asked from the head of the table. Genji’s shadow on the tablecloth nodded in sharp soldierly lies, emitting an “mm!” of agreement. Sayuki, seated at Hanzo’s left elbow, was more elaborate, “The beds are so comfy here, Mr. Shimada!”

 

Genji giggled, and Sayuki’s shadow roiled on the red cloth, glaring at him without a face or eyes.

 

“The wind here, as always, is impeccably fresh,” Mrs. Yanai told Sojiro. She sat between him and Genji, and across from her daughter. Her shadow was a hill of dress fabric and the spokes of her pins. “None of that metal smell like the city.”

 

Hanzo slid his hand beneath the rice bowl and fixed his chopsticks on the milky filament of his egg. Suitably posed, he watched Sojiro’s response.

 

“I am lucky your husband finds my humble countryside a worthy retreat even when he cannot join us,” the man crowed. “For once we have almost as many elegant ladies as we do rambunctious boys in this house. It is a presence I have long missed.”

 

“Oh! Sojiro!” Mrs. Yanai fit her slender ringed fingers over his arm. They issued each other tiny cupfuls of smiles, and she squeezed him before she let go. Sayuki and Genji communicated with their eyes, snickering. Genji peeled out another cut of Hanzo’s fish. Hanzo laid the chopsticks to rest and snatched Genji’s wrist.

 

Genji dropped the knife to the tablecloth. Hanzo did not let go, but squinted at their joined hands, trying to see if he could spot the dragon beneath the thief.

 

Genji tugged himself loose.

 

“Don’t be weird,” he gritted at Hanzo from the corner of his lips.

 

Hanzo took a deep breath, and when he exhaled the table was empty and spotless. Sojiro lingered at the door, propping his tall figure on the frame, wagging his hand to bid his guests onward. Hanzo went to him, and he turned around as if he were dancing.

 

“You okay?” He threaded his fingers across Hanzo’s brow. Genji had been hungover the week before and passed it off as a fever. Hanzo waited, to see if maybe Sojiro detected something, but he dropped his hand. “You’re nice and cool,” Sojiro praised him.

 

“Do you have someone taste the food?” Hanzo asked.

 

Sojiro’s blinked his pale moonlight eyes. Butternut speckled each iris, inherited from the wood of the dining table.

 

“The chef has been cooking for us since I was your age,” he explained, lifting his shoulders. He smiled. “Did you not like your fish? I can tell him.” Hanzo shrank away, eyes drifting down the metallic gray pinstripes of Sojiro’s suit.

 

“Have you heard anything about the Aoyama?”

 

“Again, Hanzo?” Sojiro frowned. “They have not missed a payment.”

 

“Money…” Hanzo glared thinly at the shiny buttons of the man’s suit jacket.

 

“There are dramatizations everywhere. I know it is hard to understand.” Sojiro hefted his palms out to his sides. “But our enterprise is very civilized these days. In the past, the Yanai were our enemies too. The more of them we lift out with us, the more harmony we have.” Hanzo’s anger drained, paled, turned to moonlight. He was freezing.

 

“I feel like I am losing my mind,” he gasped, hanging his head for the shame of it. Sojiro’s shadow did not progress across the floor to him, of course. It would be inappropriate. He closed his eyes, grown out of love. “Nothing you say makes any sense to me.”

 

Pressed wool arms folded around his head and shoulder. Sojiro was warm around him.

 

“Breathe with me,” he instructed, and Hanzo calibrated his heart to the rhythm of the one tapping against his ear. Sojiro pet him through his hair, even if that mussed Hanzo’s meticulously straight curtain of it. “You are like your mother,” he encouraged.

 

“Crazy?” Hanzo growled, though the heat in his chest was not all anger. “Or dead?”

 

“Someone who inspires me to be a better man.” Hanzo opened his mouth. “Breathe,” Sojiro commanded. “Just as you were at the table. Don’t think your father sees nothing.” Hanzo fluttered the wet from his eyes. “You will be free of this place and your youth soon enough,” came the promise. Sojiro’s suit smelled of old oak and late flowers. “And you will not have to think about your role here until you are better prepared for it. I know you are excited for school.” Hanzo lifted his head, confirming this. This one thing if nothing else. “I am so proud of your accomplishments, so that is the vacation I assign to you.” Sojiro grinned. “And until we part, I will have you take a more active role in the business. You won’t have time to lose your mind.”

 

His lips bent short, reconsidering. “Maybe not the negotiations with Mr. Yanai-- he’s a little tricky. But the government and the foreigners, certainly. One step at a time, until you outrun me.”

 

Sojiro angled for a kiss at his forehead, and Hanzo pushed himself separate with a grunt of self-recovery, crossing his arms. Sojiro lowered his head. “I think you know I need help sometimes too,” he said with a thin smile. “It may not be fair to ask you for it…” Squeezing his arms around his chest, Hanzo shook his head.

 

Echoing Sojiro’s appearance of happiness, he relaxed.

 

* * *

 

“This is your son?” The man from Talon inspected Hanzo. “I suppose he belongs to your ambitions.”

 

Hanzo exhaled, and welcomed the eyes so eager to meet his. The Talon agent gnashed his teeth, corners of his mouth twisting to the technical status of a grin. His cologne leaned with him across the table, thick fire turning wood to ashes, heavy spice demanding attention. Other solid suggestions lurked beneath his veneer, granite and steel. Hanzo stared at the tendon straps molding the back of his left hand. “You should not sit so small in a room,” the stranger suggested. “Pretending you, of all things, are a flower without words.”

 

“My ambitions belong to him,” Sojiro murmured from Hanzo’s side. “He is the next era of me. That is how parents and children work, Akande. Bear in mind that one day, he will be the one you deal with.” He sliced a nakedly joyful gleam in the corner of Hanzo’s vision.

 

“Thank you for the wisdom.” Akande abandoned his greedy eyes and his teeth, pursing his deep brow at Sojiro. “Don’t you have another son? What will he be doing?”

 

“I do have my sparrow.” Sojiro laughed, the caramel wine sound that always lighted mentions of Genji. “He will help Hanzo manage everything.”

 

Akande spread his hands on the tabletop. This time Hanzo traced the specular oil of the metal on the right arm, etched gold where it protruded from Akande’s jacket sleeve. Ruminating thunder coursed through the hull of the man’s chest.

 

“Now that is something I really cannot understand.” Akande searched the ouroboros etched on the polished mahogany between him and the Shimada family. “I think because I am an only child,” he chuckled. “But I could never be content giving my life away to another’s enterprise. I would make my intentions known. Take control, preferably. Seniority is merely a scheme. I would punish those who take advantage of me.” He watched Hanzo.

 

“Perhaps it is Mr. Adeyemi you should be revealing this flaw of yours to,” Hanzo replied. Akande’s lips wrinkled. Sojiro rolled his eyes at the empty door of the meeting room, propping his elbow on the table and assuming a casual posture even worse than Akande’s sticky hands at the tabletop. Hanzo reclined proper against his seat back. Akande’s focus flicked from father to son, reassessing. “If he ever returns from the bathroom,” Hanzo scoffed.

 

“I don’t know what got into him,” Akande laughed. He circled his arms above the table, making the invisible belly of a god. “He insisted on eating before we visited, but I never imagined…” He simpered at the doorway. “I’m not sure meetings like this are his strong suit. But don’t worry Hanzo, he will understand me sooner or later.”

 

“You seem right at home,” Sojiro slipped in, inky smooth. “Perhaps you would like to negotiate on his behalf, so that we are not wasting too much of his precious time.”

 

“I am honored you think I could change the outcome,” Akande began.

 

“I didn’t say that.” Sojiro had gone even softer. Akande’s smile skipped a beat. “But I do think young men should be able to practice before they meet the real world.” He winked at Hanzo, who bowed his head, though not so low he could not take measure of their guest. Akande remained bold in his observation of them, wide and clear-eyed, covetous of all details. Hanzo bit into his lower lip. “More tea, my friend?” Sojiro asked. He flicked his powerful summons at a girl standing by the wall. Her hands clasped together at her waist, her body sheathed in a sleek golden dragon dress, her hair tipped blonde. She strode into the kitchen before Akande could even affirm.

 

Despite how he dressed the girl, Hanzo had never seen Sojiro take her to his room. She served the tea, and sometimes he spoke with her after meetings, much more casual than in these crucial moments, and she listened to him jabber. But Sojiro always dismissed her after, as if he was the one who had died and she was only visiting his monument. As she poured tea for Akande, Hanzo considered she might be something he wanted for Sojiro more than Sojiro wished for it himself. It did not make any sense to want things for the most powerful man in Japan.

 

“Your son is quite the man already,” Akande noted, and Hanzo’s vision cleared-- he had been following the waves of the girl’s thighs beneath the pencil drape of her dress. “I imagine there is almost nothing left for him to learn.”

 

“But much yet that he can teach me,” Sojiro offered with a serene smile.

 

Akande nettled the thick plastic and flesh of his fingers atop the table, closing his eyes. Hanzo glanced at Sojiro, now that such movements were without cost. Sojiro was studying Akande’s untouched teacup, his face oddly relaxed and warm, beside a cleansing river rather than trapped in a red meeting room. Akande used his cybernetic hand to retrieve the teacup, opening his eyes as he drew a sip.

 

“I cannot imagine your disagreement lies with our methods, Mr. Shimada,” he said in a new voice, throat opened by the tea. It was still English though. Still hideous.

 

“Worse,” Sojiro chuckled. “It is your goals I find distasteful. An unworthy foundation for a relationship.”

 

“I thought you of all people would believe in the exaltation of humanity.” Akande’s forehead wrenched over his eyes, and he was almost ugly.

 

“Exaltation?” Sojiro pecked at his own teacup. “That is not how Mr. Adeyemi phrased it.”

 

“It is the story of the Shimada Clan, if I read it right.” Akande cleared his discomfort with his tea, eyes snapping across Sojiro’s again. Did he not understand his rudeness? Had his superior not offered him any cultural training? “When Akinjide told me we were coming here, I undertook a modest effort at understanding why such a family, and not someone better-connected in Tokyo, is in the position of rule over this country. As it turns out, history claims the Shimada came from nowhere. That means ‘nothing’,” he sighed victoriously. “At some point one of your ancestors refused to accept such a life any longer, and here you are. That is the kind of story I like most. Can you tell me what happened?”

 

“Who can say?” Sojiro lamented. “That was hundreds of years ago. Men do not remember clearly after so long. All that remains are aesthetics.” He twirled his finger along the dragon pattern rimming his teacup in blue. “But I think your understanding of our story may be incomplete.” Akande offered his hands in entreaty, bowing his buzz cut when Sojiro deigned to look out at him. “My father was born frozen in Sapporo,” Sojiro said. “My wife administered a modest political office in Kyoto. My son will marry into one of those ‘better-connected families’ in Tokyo.” Akande peered at Hanzo, who did not flinch. The dark wells of his eyes shifted back to Sojiro. “The rest of my kin ebb and flow around Mt. Fuji,” Sojiro dreamed aloud. “Some of them have been gone so long, we no longer recognize them when we meet them again. We do not elevate ourselves above others,” he decided. “We join with them, and rely on them. Such interconnectedness is our most human quality, and it is a joy.”

 

“Though…never with anyone outside this country,” Akande ventured after a brief hesitation. Sojiro lifted the plucked cursive of his eyebrows.

 

“That would be unpalatable to elder members of the Clan,” Hanzo instructed the fool.

 

“Then there are limitations.” Akande smirked. “Even for your kind.”

 

“There are discretions that would be wise,” Sojiro added mildly.

 

“What we seek is more pure,” Akande said, though Hanzo thought _we_ was interchangeable with _I_ _._ “Hundreds of years…” he digested aloud.

 

Sojiro motioned for a tea refill, but Akande stopped the serving girl with a raise of his palm. “I wonder if, after so long in power, you do not forgive others trying to reach your heights? Would you hold back the world to maintain your place on that beautiful mountaintop?” He spun his finger along the same teacup dragons Sojiro followed earlier. “It may be that we are actually enemies.” He grinned, bashful he had not thought of it previously.

 

“That would be a terrible shame,” Sojiro noted.

 

“Are you looking for a new wife, Sojiro?” Both Shimadas goggled at the Talon man when he used that name, both briefly glass-eyed. Akande copied the tranquility Sojiro once had such a sure grip on, and smiled at them. The elder Shimada recovered faster.

 

“I have healthy sons.”

 

Before he recognized the risks of his expression, Hanzo looked away from his father.

 

“Well if you need someone, let me know and I can recommend them to you. But they would not be from this country…” Akande crafted a scimitar of his lips. Sojiro sat back against his velvet chair appointments.

 

“Could be fun,” he laughed. Akande rolled with him, the two of them booming against the high ceiling. Hanzo marked his father with a tight-mouthed stare.

 

“Sojiro,” he interjected, again without thinking. He had an internal notation that Genji was not here to pitch a fit about his choice of address, and that was all he needed to blurt it out. A messy instinct.

 

Akande’s laughter dwindled first.

 

“Leave behind your island for the world,” he declared. “Join us, and reach beyond centuries of blood. We were born into a rare opportunity: the absolute unity of humanity brought about by the Crisis.” Sojiro was with him for the first part, but his eyes fell to Akande’s prosthetic at mention of the war. Hanzo could not tell what he was reading from its luxurious glint. “Now they await leaders to show them what lies beyond their crudest impulses. Painters that will give them color.”

 

“Or given your organization’s title, knives that will cut them into shape?” Sojiro suggested.

 

“You are not from Hanamura,” Akande muttered, irritated but not deterred. “That much I am sure is true. You are a conqueror. And so to you this should be just another river crossing. There is no reason to object.” He extended his metal hand toward Hanzo. “I wonder why, after so many years of tradition, you chose to prize two sons as your heirs instead of just the one.”

 

Mr. Adeyemi ducked in the doorway, chalky of skin and holding his stomach, apologizing for the delay. “Perhaps rather than just eating the local food as much as you please, you ought to ask what it is first,” Akande needled him affably. Mr. Adeyemi appeared too lethargic to protest. Neither Sojiro nor Akande mentioned their interim discussion, and with apologies, Sojiro negotiated the limited terms of their provisions to the Talon organization. Then he offered Mr. Adeyemi a room to recover.

 

“We have many beds for guests, sadly empty these days,” he said to better beckon the man. Adeyemi agreed, and security escorted the guests out. Adeyemi wore a silver-navy blazer and pants, an unfitting mimicry of Sojiro. Akande had stripped to his black vest and lavender button-up as they talked, flashing annoyance from the hallway until the last bit of him passed beyond the wall.

 

Sojiro turned to Hanzo, resting one hand on the table. Hanzo noticed after a while his copy of the gesture, the way their postures met like mirrors.

 

“What do you think?” Sojiro inquired, warm and eager to hear from him.

 

“They are eating each other.”

 

“Graphic,” he laughed.

 

“Akande thinks he is being clever.” Hanzo scowled. The Nigerian’s self-confidence might have endeared a lesser man. “But had he succeeded in changing your mind, he would have only angered his superior for usurping him. He could have jeopardized the whole deal.”

 

“He has not perfected his methods yet,” Sojiro agreed. “So he comes off as a buffoon. Especially to you, I think.” He smiled at Hanzo’s surprise. “Did his choice of social graces remind you of someone?” Hanzo snorted. “I found him…”

 

Sojiro looked away. “…inspiring.”

 

“You could not have been taken in by his attempts to be charming,” Hanzo half-stated, half-warned.

 

“I allowed it a little,” Sojiro sighed. “I had to, if I want to understand him. People speak with more than their words. You cannot calculate them within a void. I think that may be a difficulty of yours, my son.” He reached out to play with Hanzo’s bangs, and Hanzo held very still, glaring at him. “You do not allow anyone to touch you.”

 

“Neither do you,” Hanzo snapped. Sojiro’s eyes widened. Hanzo lifted his chin at the small kitchen adjacent the meeting room, where their server was preparing drinks of slightly greater potency for the coming evening. Slips of her golden scales shimmered in and out of view from their angle into the doorway.

 

“I couldn’t do that. Yasu is a lovely woman,” Sojiro professed, shocked. “I would probably lose my head without her. It would be taking advantage.” Hanzo narrowed his eyes.

 

“Would it also be immoral?” he chided. “Against some code of employment? Criminal?” Sojiro frowned at him. “You are Sojiro Shimada,” Hanzo reminded him. Sojiro smiled faintly, and Yasu came out to take his empty cup.

 

Sojiro entreated her with his eyebrows.

 

“Remember how nervous you were when you first started? What was it? Two whole months ago!” Yasu’s fingers lingered on the teacup without lifting it from the table. “Am I still scary now?” Sojiro asked. He made a claw with one hand.

 

“You are terrifying, Master,” Yasu answered in monotone, and Sojiro nodded. “Did you want more tea?”

 

“Not right now I think.” She bowed and left them, returning to her kitchenette. Hanzo stared pointedly at Sojiro, who watched him from the corner of his eye.

 

“What do you know of such things anyway, Hanzo?” Sojiro asked with sudden interest.

 

“Nothing you need to hear about,” Hanzo snarled. Sojiro pouted, but moved on.

 

“It is because I really listened to Mr. Ogundimu that I agree with him. We are enemies, or will be when he grows a little more. Perhaps not for the reasons he thinks.” Hanzo opened his mouth, and shut it again. Sojiro had more: “He wants the whole world. He will not forgive an island.”

 

“And you have handed him the weapons to take it,” Hanzo beat in an outrage. Sojiro held up his hand.

 

“The money Talon gives us is more flexible than bullets and data. By not getting drawn further into their upstart plot, we have already won. If Akande does not like the arrangement…” Sojiro waved his hands in at himself. “He knows where to find me.”

 

Hanzo’s shoulders eased, however briefly his father let them. “I think I will go and show him the garden,” Sojiro brightened. “It would be boring for him to spend the evening watching his ailing mentor.” Hanzo hissed out through his teeth. “She did not make it to be alone in,” Sojiro advised him.

 

“But that man is…”

 

Sojiro smiled. It was soft, but it warmed his skin, clarified his features, drew him stronger in his throne. Somehow it even made him more familiar.

 

“We cannot let every part of our home be a graveyard, Hanzo. We need space to live.”

 

Hanzo inhaled sharply rather than offering comment. Sojiro glanced around the room. “Didn’t I ask Genji to attend?”

 

“He said he does not want to talk about guns,” Hanzo sniffed. “Why do you not command him better? Stop him from pretending. He brings dishonor to our name.”

 

“Who told you that?” Sojiro asked with coiled lips.

 

“It is obvious!” Hanzo barked. “Great-uncle says he has long spoken of this to you, yet you do not listen.” Sojiro gazed away across the red wallpaper.

 

“I see.” He held up his hand, waggling his fingers. “Maybe Genji is our test case.” Hanzo blinked. “He’ll show us Mr. Ogundimu’s world without limitations,” Sojiro grinned.

 

* * *

 

That world was overwhelmingly blue. It had no lid, and if he looked straight up or down, it darkened to the purple of space.

 

Clouds served as depth markers. Pools of white fanned above his head and below his feet, spiraling from the glamor of the ocean. Train tracks linked divine stations by fade-in pulses of golden arms. His platform was deserted, aside from himself and Genji. An orange cat issued a potent _nyan_ at him from under a nearby bench, and Hanzo smiled even though he knew the truth. The cat arched its back, hologram flickering as it curled its slinky body around the bench leg.

 

A billboard on the other side of the platform said _Je t’aime pour toujours_ and showed a woman in a lavender dress bowing on one leg, her other foot high in the air to create a swan in reverse. The billboard also said _three nights only!_

Genji’s hands fluttered all around his face.

 

“There’s a girl at school who thinks you’re hot.”

 

Hanzo lifted the trimmed black serpent of his eyebrow. “Distinctive,” Genji corrected for full honesty. “And a college man. I don’t know what about academic types gets girls going…”

 

“Some semblance of direction,” Hanzo supplied, voice brittle and dry as he fought and conquered the wind. “A plan for the future.”

 

“Oooh,” Genji cooed as if this were some previously undescribed secret of nature. He wagged his flared eyebrows at Hanzo, one after the other. Hanzo smirked, and he looked away from that gaudy expression, to the pebbled white station floor. “She’s hot too. Want to see a picture?” An excuse for Genji to squirrel out his phone. Hanzo’s smile dimmed. “I’ve had her a couple times and she’s pretty good. She cheated on me with the baseball captain but I forgave her…” Hanzo adjusted his focus to the cumulus lilypads mottling the sunlight, trying to excuse his brother’s existence with the chanting of the bullet trains.

 

Anemone waves of gelled spikes at his side drew him back. A strip of turquoise dye fluoresced in the natural black of Genji’s hair. Hanzo built a steady, unresponsive statue of himself, blazer suspended over his shoulder, necktie and the top two buttons of his shirt undone. Genji met him that afternoon wearing a sleeveless top with the translucency and hatched pattern of fishnet stockings. Hanzo’s eyes withered at the corners. Genji did not resemble most of his similarly attired friends, the knobby sheets of skin and bone under their glittering trash. Straps of muscle bulged his shoulders against the fishnet, contracted a hard definition up his stomach. And no matter how many moisturizers and manicures he used, the fingers ticking at his phone bore a rash of white callouses.

 

Genji’s phone issued a loud confirming _BOOP,_ prompting Hanzo’s attention to the screen. He could not see past the sun glare.

 

“What did you do?”

 

Genji peered at him. He dragged his lower eyelid down to show Hanzo the pink past his liner, and stuck out his tongue.

 

Hanzo reared back with an incensed sway of his hair. The track in front of the platform solidified. Genji swept up the suitcase between them as the train arrived. He ferried Hanzo’s luggage through the sliding door, perching on the turquoise linoleum inside. Hanzo glowered at Genji and the train, the transparently sheltering act of servitude. The orange tabby reappeared, eyeing him in turn.

 

Genji dropped the suitcase and grabbed Hanzo with both arms, dragging him through the door before it slipped closed. As the weight of Hanzo departed the platform the cat vanished, yowl cut short.

 

Hanzo fussed with his fallen bag, Genji grinned at his side. He unpacked a wallet-sized glass bottle from the outermost compartment, and rolled it in his palm to check for cracks. Once certain Genji had not ruined everything, he wrestled the case into the overhead.

 

He sat on a long bench next to his brother, taking his hand. Genji allowed this, using his thumb to doodle a text while Hanzo squeezed a drop of salve out and rubbed his callouses.

 

He recoiled when Hanzo massaged the gray scaling around his index finger.

 

“You are wielding the bow wrong,” Hanzo whispered, though they were the only ones in the car. “You put too much weight here.” He tapped the side of a thatched ridge. “It needs to rest on the thinnest part…” His thumbnail glided into the joint crease of Genji’s fingertip, prompting a wince. “…and you need to wear your gloves.”

 

“You do not get to criticize if you are not there to help me,” Genji muttered, jerking his chin at the hand clutched around his, the fingers just as rough, but with fields of scars beginning to loosen around the edges.

 

“I used to wield it wrong too,” Hanzo allowed.

 

“Father taught you better,” Genji dreamed.

 

“I learned it myself.”

 

“You are just getting softer because you aren’t at home,” Genji snapped. Hanzo pushed the bottle into his hand.

 

“I found this at a shop here. It helps with the dryness. You will be smoother, more effective.” He was lamenting his choice of words as they cascaded out of his mouth.

 

“Oh? At what?” Genji laughed.

 

“Holding a sword,” Hanzo rasped, frigid with anticipation. Genji only nodded, smirking. Hanzo was surprised at the consideration. “Did you miss me?” But Genji’s response was so swift and predictable it might as well have been programmed.

 

“As if,” he scoffed. “I hide sake under your bed and no one checks there. Father is happy and smiling allllll the time. It is perfect. I get so much more ass now that no one thinks you are going to pop out of a shadow and bite their head off. You should stay gone longer! Who even wants you back? You homesick bastard.”

 

“I have no idea what the attraction is,” Hanzo wondered, and Genji peeked out of his phone. “Is looking like a homeless delinquent fashionable?” Genji’s mouth opened in wounded surprise.

 

“You are rich,” he accused. “But I am cute.” He stabbed the slender curve of his own cheek, faking a dimple as he bared his teeth. He switched his phone to selfie mode and tried on a few different faces. “I am like…a pop star style…” He set Hanzo’s bottle on the bench so he could flash his hand through the blue fire of his hair.

 

“You are rich too, Genji.”

 

“I don’t spend that much money.”

 

“Not that much?” Hanzo snarled at him and Genji wilted, pulling the toes of his designer sneakers together. “Not that much?!” Hanzo spurted again. “Father assigned me the third quarter finances for the house account. Your access card should be torn up! You will not be creating waste like that after I am done with university.”

 

Genji sank into the curve of the train wall, angling away from Hanzo, back to buttery palette of his phone screen. The bullet slowed at its last stop before it would arc across the country to Hanamura. An omnic passed onboard with a wheezing jet of pressure gaskets, beige pumps clucking at the base of its black rail frame. Genji twitched away as it passed him. Hanzo only watched. The omnic’s head was a chunk of vaguely humanoid obsidian, a keen of red light denoting each of its temples. It carried no luggage. He had no way to tell if it was staring back. It meandered to the back of the car and stood under one of the handholds, even though all the seats were empty. The train slithered down the track from the station. After a while the omnic budged its head at the suede loop dangling from the ceiling, then reached out and grabbed hold.

 

He had left his pistol in the suitcase. Sloppy. Genji sat up, speaking to him:

 

“Serious people like you are hard to get with.” Hanzo lost his focus on the omnic. “You never want to give anyone anything, but you need to know everything about them.” Genji tipped the point of his sneaker at him. “It is terrifying.”

 

“A dragon does not ask for a man’s favor, it is given.” Hanzo considered his younger brother’s face. “But you need to understand someone to love them.” Genji’s eyes went nearly round, straining the limits of his liner shaping. He recovered like Sojiro did: joking, grinning.

 

“Lying in bed, holding each other?” he oozed. “Calling each other’s names? You are a bigger fool than I, Brother. Love is something they made up for movies.” Genji did something Hanzo had never seen him do before: with his perfectly manicured, lightning-painted nails, he scratched at the top of his arm. Hanzo followed the shadow of a vein there through his elbow, but no marks or stories showed themselves. Genji stopped when his skin was only a little pink. He licked the corner of his lip. “I was with this boy…I told him ‘you’re my sweet bitch’ over and over, and he went crazy for it! They just want to know you think they are sexy. It has nothing to do with all that. Have you ever actually seen someone in love?”

 

Hanzo tried to think of it, to read from a face in his memory that elusive glow. Genji’s shoulders poked up. “Oh! But maybe I love Sayuki!”

 

“You could not love her,” Hanzo snorted. Genji put on his hurt pup eyes. “If you did, you would not betray her with so many others.”

 

“That is not a nice thing to say,” Genji whined, and Hanzo wished he could close his ears like his eyes. “What am I supposed to do? She is in Tokyo!” Genji chopped his arms at the city on stilts gleaming in purple smog behind them. Then he laid his hands to either side of the crotch of his pants, directing Hanzo to the soft bulge there. “I’m horny all the time!” Genji declared proudly. Sucking in the recycled air, Hanzo turned his face away.

 

“You are disgusting. The elders have said Father should beat you.”

 

“I love you, Hanzo.” He dared to look, and Genji was smiling for him. “Is that not enough?” Hanzo’s cheeks colored, traitors, though the extent of his shame was lost in the apple-gold glow of the sun through the windows. He shook his head. Genji’s phone whistled an entire snake of oncoming messages.

 

The omnic got off at Hanamura’s most rural station, stopping on the plasmetal platform slip to remove its pumps. It walked off the other side, down the path to a house overseeing one of the wheat farms. A couple gray cats zipped out of the crop line and rubbed around its pole legs, not holograms. Hanzo and Genji drooped from the window as their train slid away, entering the heart of the village.

 

Hanzo burrowed into the suite he shared with his brother, enveloped in a dry, stable heat offset only by the moonlit beckoning of the corridor plaster behind the paintings. Genji lingered outside, declaring he wanted red bean buns and soda _right now_. The men instructed him to go ask the chef, as they had no appropriate skills. Hanzo rolled his eyes and pushed open the door to his room.

 

The girl stood by his bed, the white pout of her blouse settled over the band of her knee-length skirt, her hair tied short like a boy. Her cosmetics shaded into her skin, conservative by the standard of Genji, with a stand-out note of purple lipstick. A sparkly green ribbon wrapped a bow on her hanging left wrist. When Hanzo’s attention finally lifted from the strip of silk to her face, she extended thin fingers behind her head. She undid her hair binding, allowing the brown to curtain forward against the corners of her lavender smile. His thought was that she should not have done it. She should have stayed as he first saw her.

 

“Genji,” he uttered as he paced to his wardrobe and nudged the twin dragons’ sigil on the double-doors. He set his suitcase inside on the red mesquite paneling, and fit his jacket to the bent ribs of a hanger.

 

“He said--”

 

“Be silent.” Hanzo took the wardrobe handles to guide the two dragons back into their circle. When he stepped toward her she inhaled, jittery and salmon in her throat. He recognized her, though it took a moment to place her. She was old for a student, and not a teacher-- but that was where he had seen her, scribing on a tablet at Genji’s parent-teacher meetings. A secretary of some kind.

 

He turned away from her and notched the bedroom door shut. When he came back, her eyes lit and her teeth flashed in a narrow ivory slip. She had a cruel smile. She showed him a pair of blue-black gloves she must have fished from the bedside drawer.

 

“Could you put them on?” she asked. Hanzo obliged.

 

When he was done, the guards Genji had paid off returned the woman’s phone and escorted her out of the castle. Hanzo put on a blue robe and went to his brother. He was playing a videogame, lounged across his bed on his stomach. When Hanzo crossed the threshold he dropped his controller, letting the game play out to his character’s death. He flicked his hands at Hanzo for details.

 

“It was nice,” Hanzo admitted, even to himself. “I liked it.” Genji hopped off the bed and hugged him. Hanzo could smell the cherry of whatever product he was misting his hair with. Genji sniffed back at him.

 

“Whoa,” he chuckled. “You’re all sweaty.” He let go hastily.

 

“Genji, tell me her name,” Hanzo asked. Genji’s surprise read in the moth beats of his eyelashes. He tilted his head, and he smiled tightly.

 

“You know…you can never see her again,” he said. “And you can’t marry her. Nothing about her should be important to you.” He crushed his hand against his chest. “That feeling, that ‘I want to be with her again’, it is some chemical. Just what happens when you are close to someone for a little while. I do not find it comfortable. You would find it excruciating.” Genji bared his teeth.

 

Hanzo ran the simple calculus of the soothsaying, and stoppered the levity in his own heart. “Don’t look so sad,” Genji mewled, though Hanzo never felt his expression change. “At least it feels good for a while.”

 

“Thank you…”

 

“Ohhh?” The demon grinned viciously. “I will not let you forget those words.”

 

“I know.” Hanzo accepted his defeat with grace.

 

* * *

 

“Open your mouth.” Genji demonstrated, as if he were a baby. “ _Ahhhh._ ” He poked his own pink circle of lips with his index fingers. Hanzo parted his mouth a bit. Genji dropped his hands and evaluated his canvas.

 

He painted a white veil down Hanzo’s chin with his feathery brush. After drying the paint with a nozzled tube of plastic, he switched instruments and sketched a red line along Hanzo’s bottom lip, and an ebony stroke to match along the top.

 

Hanzo smacked his lips, trying not to run his tongue into the make-up.

 

“If…someone sees…” he mumbled, a little heady from sitting still on the frostbitten earth for so long.

 

“It’s too cold. They don’t want to be out here this early in those suits. They think you are just training anyway.” Genji waved at the targets speckled in the pale sun across the lawn from their seats. They lurked in v-neck sweaters and prized quilts beneath the shade of a wooden exterior wall, the frigid air around them damping all color and sound. Dying grass dressed the soil beneath their jeans in choppy brown horse-hair. “When we are done, you can go straight to your room and wash it off. Just relax for now.” Genji chose a thicker brush and dipped it in his red paint. Sometimes, over the acid pulp of molding vegetation, Hanzo picked up the mineral odors of the different colors his brother made.

 

He assumed a neutral face. Genji dragged on his cheeks. “Re- _lax_.”

 

“Those are the bones of my face.”

 

Genji clucked his tongue and fixed his finger marks with the tickling base of the brush. Then he scribbled into the angles under Hanzo’s sclera. Hanzo looked down, at his mouth hanging open in concentration. Genji breathed in his face, warm and moist.

 

He closed his eyes, corners of his eyelids twitching at the wingbeats grazing his skin.

 

“Relax,” Genji drummed, and Hanzo kept silent since he knew any protest would be met with more of the same. Genji stopped to wrangle his bangs back into his tie. “Should cut your hair.”

 

“No.” He could feel when Genji stopped breathing to smirk at him.

 

“You will need some contacts if you want to look like Father.”

 

Hanzo opened his eyes to strike Genji with a glare. Genji glanced downward. “Don’t bite your lip.” He bent away, toward the hologram he had laid out on the wrinkled grass. “How did you get such a big role?” he asked as he followed the configuration of red slashes across the virtual canvas.

 

His fingers slid up to Hanzo’s eye sockets. Hanzo remained silent. Genji stayed his painting, staring at him through the thicket of fingerbones and skin.

 

“I lied on the application,” Hanzo admitted. “But I did well in try-outs.”

 

“Naughty.” Genji created rivers of paint down his temples, following the wells of his eyes, tapering over his cheeks. “But not enough for the lead,” he teased.

 

“I am not going to beat the best in Tokyo on my first attempt. This is how I wanted it.” Hanzo was talking too much, so Genji retreated to remix his colors, wetting the palette tray with a squirt bottle. “I can learn from him.” Hanzo made a fist, joints frosting white.

 

“Take his place next year,” Genji proposed.

 

“Obviously.”

 

“You’re so cool.” Genji grinned, and Hanzo smiled back at him. Genji smoothed his cheek back to static before starting on the other half of his paint. “The reputation is not what it was. Father would not mind. You can invite him.” Hanzo shifted his hands out, held onto the points of his knees like a meditation.

 

“The people there would discover who I am. It would no longer be about me,” he asserted, and Genji snickered. “It would be about our family.”

 

“I understand. Can I come?”

 

“Who else is going to do my make-up?” Hanzo grumbled.

 

“You are supposed to do it yourself,” Genji laughed. “That is how you really become someone else. Make-up is never just for the people looking at you. You enjoy this, but you have no idea why.” He dismissed his instructional hologram and picked his phone off the ground, switching on the camera and handing it to Hanzo. “You better find a good excuse for pulling me out of school for that long.”

 

“Tokyo is the real world,” Hanzo concocted, blinking at his own dramatic eyes. “I will need you to learn how to handle yourself there, with those modern people. My tutors took me many places. I will do the same with you.” He smiled at the man in the mirror. He dressed in a theatric glower at himself-- only to smile again, bigger, cat-like with his colorful lips. The breeze picked up, but he did not feel cold at all.

 

“Your ears are turning blue,” Genji noted. “Let’s go…” He stopped mid-impulse.

 

Hanzo checked over the brim of the phone: Genji was squinting past him, thick eyebrows creased. Hanzo glanced behind himself, seeing nothing.

 

When he turned around, Genji’s hand clamped on his shoulder, leaving a white print of paint as he rocked upright. “Weird bug…” Genji mumbled over Hanzo’s yelp of indignation, and with his brother as a stepping-stone, he rose to the wall.

 

He sat back down in front of Hanzo with something in his hand.

 

“What did you catch?” Hanzo snapped, irritable at this interruption. “A red beetle?”

 

“You should focus on your play. This is a house matter.” Genji folded his hand to his chest. “I can handle it.” He scrambled up and surged past Hanzo, who simply caught him by the ankle and flipped him onto the frostbitten grass. Standing, he smashed the Genji’s rising shoulders back to earth with his foot. He bent forward and paint dripped down Genji’s arm to his wrist.

 

“What is the game this time?” Hanzo demanded, grabbing the offending limb. Genji’s hand flowered open. He rolled over and held out his palm in proper offering.

 

They stared together at the brown metal tick lying upended on his skin. It had a circular aperture on one end, a whirlpool of nanites gyrating through the air beside the lens to magnify its recorded view. Genji switched tacks.

 

“You know,” he gushed. Easygoing, nonchalant. “A drone this size is _illegal_.” He jabbed his thumb into the drone’s aperture and pushed until it cracked. The nanites fell from the air, glittering across his hand and the grass. “We should call the police.”

 

“Did you put it out here, Genji?” Hanzo requested on a shallow breath. Genji had been surprised to see the drone. It was not one of his pranks. It was the real world, sitting in his hand. Genji shook his head and Hanzo took it from him.

 

“I do not think the owner will put his name on it, Brother,” Genji hummed as Hanzo turned the drone around between his fingers. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes, smearing some of the red from his eye sockets.

 

“It may still be transmitting a signal. Call Tadao.” Hanzo caught himself. “No. Call Father.” Genji shook his head, smiling. “Do it.”

 

“He might not be happy that you got him out of bed for this.” Genji typed into his phone.

 

Sojiro arrived alone. That bothered Hanzo. He should have gathered some of the guards. Hanzo could have evaluated who he picked. They found nothing identifying on the drone by the time he arrived, but Sojiro carried a more potent analysis tool in his right hand, a crystal ball full of circuits. He tossed the device onto the ground next to Hanzo, who paired it with the drone. Whatever signal the drone was sending had already gone dead.

 

“Are you doing okay?” Genji asked Sojiro, who was gray and sweating despite the season. Hanzo had not been to see him since he got home. He had not meant to. On this visit he had gone straight to Genji.

 

In their phone call a week ago, Sojiro said he had a bit of a seasonal fever. Hanzo blinked at him now.

 

“I’m fine,” Sojiro clarified wearily. “The chill out here helps. I forget what it feels like, with those fools constantly turning up the thermostats. I am not drinking another cup of tea, not ever. Tell Tadao he can’t make me.” He held out his hand to the drone. “We will have to check the grounds for others.”

 

“How long could these have been here?” Hanzo asked, back an electric spike as he got up to face the man. Sojiro took a deep breath before he spoke.

 

“The digital sweeps are every…” He blinked, milky-eyed, at Hanzo.

 

“What?” Hanzo demanded.

 

“Your face,” Sojiro mumbled. He covered the center of his chest with his hand. “You’re…covered in blood.” He breathed a few times in visible lurches of his chest and head, gaze detaching from Hanzo, and from his surroundings.

 

The head of the Shimada Clan swayed off his feet and fell into his son’s arms, his long black hair pooling over his hands. Hanzo went to one knee, unprepared for the weight. He dragged Sojiro’s hair off his face. Sojiro’s eyes were open, rolled white, and his breath came in chest-wracking gasps, air scrabbling up the inside of his throat to get out.

 

“Call Tadao!” Hanzo begged Genji as he held Sojiro’s cheek, which turned pink from the accumulation of burst blood vessels.

 

When he did not hear fingertips on a phone matte, he looked over his shoulder. Genji was staggered against the wall, pinned like a fly, eyes popped wide and unblinking as he inhaled the sight of their father. “Do as I say!” Hanzo yelled, colder than the air, and Genji’s eyes jerked toward him. Genji cowered down to find his phone and sent the text.

 

By the time the men took Sojiro, pink dilute from his nose and mouth and ears drenched Hanzo’s powder blue sleeve. Tadao touched his face and he slapped the old man’s hand away. Tadao glanced at the make-up on his fingers, and spurred his creaking legs after their father’s gurney.

 

Hanzo twisted toward the cliff past the archery targets, a handful of dead trees all that held him back from the castle’s outer wall. His gaze rose to the thin gray mist past the ramparts. “I will kill him,” he decided.

 

“Who?”

 

Genji’s voice. Hanzo had almost forgotten he existed. He turned around, and Genji was crouched next to the wet vermillion spot where Sojiro had fallen. Hanzo stalked toward him.

 

“Sojiro’s schedule one week ago said the man from Talon was here, renegotiating his contracts. Did you attend?” Genji shook his head, crossing his arms around his chest. “Did you see him? Do you know who I am talking about?” Genji shook his head again, a kind of thrash, hands channeling upward to pull at his own hair. Hanzo closed his eyes as he exhaled, but his chest was still too narrow after, and a bell jiggled beneath his skin, shrieking brass inside his veins. “I will destroy him and his entire organization.”

 

Genji looked up.

 

“Father needs us,” he peeped.

 

“This is how I am useful to Sojiro,” Hanzo proclaimed. Genji did not even protest, but stood up to match him eye-to-eye. Hanzo grit his teeth.

 

“It may not have been Talon.” Genji held his chest like their father had. Hanzo shifted closer, eyeing him, but he realized his gesture and dropped his hand. He panted. “Aoyama. Or one of those other families. Or the government. They could have timed it to make it seem like Talon.” Hanzo realized Genji could slow himself down. His breathing eased as he bent down to find the broken drone in the grass. Why could he do it, when Hanzo’s own heart still burned? “Our enemy does not have a face.” Frowning, Genji leveled his phone. “I’m calling Great-uncle.”

 

Hanzo read the glowing lines of the elder Shimada’s name as it popped up on the screen. He set his hand over the phone, smearing the plastic with cherry sewage.

 

“It could have been one of them too,” he gasped. Genji glanced helplessly at his phone. “We are all alone now,” Hanzo realized, eyes showing their whites. “We must kill all our enemies. One-by-one.”

 

“You are being too emotional,” Genji dared. “We have to be sure--”

 

“This is _logical._ This is who I am. I will never be weak like him!” Hanzo bellowed, and Genji fell back a step from him. He was shaking. “Or you,” Hanzo spit at him. “You have never earned the right to lecture me.”

 

All the fire went with his words. Yet even as he began to sense the earth beneath his feet again, Genji shoved past him and jogged to the front of the Castle, where he joined the train of motorcycles headed for the hospital.

 

The doctors called it a novel nanobiotic infection, a rare configuration error of the world in which they lived. Some of the ever-present nanites in the air and earth adhered to the DNA in Sojiro’s body the wrong way. Hanzo stole some of the raw blood sample from the hospital laboratory, passing the vial to Tadao. _Find out where it came from._

 

He woke from an awkward, ache-trailing crumple over the arm of a waiting room chair to find his uncle’s hand on his shoulder. Hanzo scowled his best puffy pink eyes at his graceful, wrinkled relative, but all Uncle did was calmly inquire as to Genji’s whereabouts.

 

Hanzo could not find him in the hospital, and none of the guards reported him at home. Uncle suggested the arcade, “as his kind is so attracted by the glittering lights”. Hanzo notched the insult for later judgment, and at first he ignored the advice. He thought Genji might have simply gotten hungry, which was not a sin, though he could not feel any want for food inside himself. His stomach was a heavy rock in his abdomen. When he passed himself in a shop mirror, he noticed the shivering. Just like Genji. He put a stop to it.

 

He could not put a specific time to how long he stood in front of the arcade’s double-doors. He stepped inside, let his eyes adjust, and searched the blacklit game cabinets. Following the neon fingers of the wall signs, he examined the upper floors. He spoke with the clerk at the token exchange, who said he had not seen Genji. Hanzo left the arcade smiling. At least Genji’s honor was intact.

 

A police car glided to a stop in front of him when he reached the edge of the street. The passenger window rolled away.

 

“Oh Hanzo! Did you need a ride too?” the officer called, a little sheepish but friendly. He was Hanzo’s age, a traffic patroller. Had his bosses not informed him of the current priorities? Hanzo evaluated his offer.

 

“Where?”

 

“Fujisato? With your brother?” The most gaudy and touristy of the village’s shopping districts. Hanzo framed his hand on the wing of the car’s rear door. It was on the other side of town, as far from the hospital as possible.

 

“The train is faster.” He pulled away, leaving the officer sputtering, maybe even ashamed at the grading of his services. The chill in Hanzo’s stomach stabbed upwards.

 

Fujisato had its own arcade. Genji was loitering at a table just outside, make-up heavy, bragging to a girl about his high score. She had more interest in the cheap box of fast food on the metal tabletop in front of her, but drifted her eyes up toward his grin politely every few seconds. Hanzo did not remember walking over, just his hands mashing up the back of Genji’s bomber jacket, tearing him away from the girl and throwing him into a row of arcade machines.

 

“ _Don’t be a coward!_ ” he roared.

 

Genji did not move. He lay on the floor holding his arm, pieces of glass and silver sticking from his clothing like spines. His ribs worked up and down rapidly, and when Hanzo stepped closer to examine him, he tried to scramble away into the wall of machines.

 

A tourist called the police.

 

“Of course, Mr. Shimada,” the answering officer offered after Hanzo explained the situation, and she summoned emergency services.

 

The doctors stared at Hanzo over their tablets as they explained Genji’s wrist and ankle were fractured, and he would have to wear casts for a few days while nanomachine injections repaired him. Genji protested wildly, ignoring Hanzo’s commands. He sat for the injections only when Tadao explained how many weeks it would take otherwise, and how it might be imperfect if the machines did not handle it.

 

He was ready to go home at the same time as Sojiro. Shortly thereafter, he disappeared. Though it went on for days, Hanzo did not look for him.

 

He dropped out of his current semester in Tokyo. A popular theater in the Ginza district lost one of its upcoming heroes with no explanation, and management placed a black mark beside the name and photo in its actor book: _UNRELIABLE – DO NOT HIRE._

 

* * *

 

Hanzo returned home from a business meeting, greeted by his hushed, empty castle. Sojiro had a consult with the family doctor while he was out, so the first thing he did was head to the master bedroom. He did not have to open the door. The DNAR notice was posted over the dragon carving in the wood. Sojiro’s signature graced the lower tiers of the hologram. Hanzo read the entire fine print. Then he turned around and went to the kitchen, where he poured himself a cup of sake.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter:** See through the dragon's eyes.
>   * I split this chapter, partly for length, partly because I'm in the middle of meandering about the planet for work. It's time (again) to find out how good I am at writing at airports!
>   * Me in early 2017: Is Genji and Hanzo's dad not dead or something, is that why they're telling us his name? Is he the next hero?!?! Another dead dad hero really Blizz?!! / Me now: Thank you Blizz for releasing this random Shimada name trivia so I didn't have to make something up for entire chapters of content #blessed
>   * Happy 2nd Anniversary Overwatch!
>   * _geta_ \- a wooden sandal traditionally worn with kimono
>   * _Eldredge knot_ \- ahem, <https://www.ties.com/how-to-tie-a-tie>
>   * _Wolf and Dragon_ \- constellations visible over Japan in Summer (other visible constellations include Sagittarius, and the Southern and Northern Crowns)
>   * _sundew_ \- a genus of carnivorous plants whose leaves have evolved into sticky, mobile tentacles for attracting and asphyxiating prey
>   * _Kyoto_ \- the former imperial capitol of Japan, located on Honshu Island, but significantly further southwest from Tokyo
>   * _Je t'aime pour toujours_ \- French phrase, lit. "I love you for everyday", more commonly interpreted as "I love you forever" or "I'll always love you"
>   * _DNAR_ \- Do Not Attempt Resucitation, a legal order advising medical personnel to allow natural death if a patient's heart stops or they incur brain death. End-of-life care is a very touchy subject in modern Japan, with such decisions typically undertaken by entire families rather than individual patients. Japanese physicians are much less likely to discuss withholding care compared to those in North America or Europe. However, attitudes about end-of-life care have changed a great deal in the past decade
>   * Kabuki theater began as a series of sultry dances and skits performed by a mostly-female troupe of prostitutes, runaways, and other misfits led by an ex-shrine maiden. Many kabuki dances blended spirituality with carnality, balancing between Buddhist ideas of moderation and restriction, and Shinto myths about nature and fertility. Performers engaged in prostitution after shows, and in 1629 the ruling Tokugawa clan banned female kabuki. At this point all-male kabuki took root, with young men taking women's roles in the various plays. All-male kabuki was also presented as erotic drama, with the actors doubling as prostitutes. This form of kabuki was banned in 1652.  
>    
>  At that point, all-male kabuki continued with a greater emphasis on costumes, scenery, make-up, and richer dramatic content to compensate for the absence of erotic elements. Though kabuki's modern artform was vastly developed during this time, its existence was somewhat tenuous and shunned by the ruling regime of the Tokugawa shogunate. In 1868 the shogunate disbanded, and by 1887 kabuki was being performed for the new Emperor of Japan.  
>    
>  After WWII, occupying forces briefly banned kabuki for its use as war propaganda. Some kabuki troupes now use women for female roles, and some all-female troupes have been established again since the end of WWII. In 2005, UNESCO listed kabuki as a form of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
>   * Typically broad red stripes in kabuki paint signify the protagonist's hot-blooded, open-hearted vigor. In the very earliest uses of the make-up, red represented a warrior who granted possession of his body to a local guardian deity, becoming a divine force called hitogami (lit. "man-god").  
>    
>  Blue patterns tend to describe characters who withold their emotions, especially anger, until they become evil.
> 



	24. Take Me With You

 

A perfect circle; he drew it with his finger along a glass dome sheltering a pile of camera drones. The pale of his fingertip bulged and shrank across their shattered eyes. The office was dim, not inclined to detail. He could have been writing on air.

 

Shades of wine dribbled from the door crack, painting a rose across the sponge of Tadao’s face at the other side of the desk.

 

“We could request analysis from one of the machines,” the old man crackled. Hanzo’s eyes lifted wide and murky at him. He bowed his head. “I realize it is a radical approach.” He crumbled his thin, leathery hands together. “But Miss Yanai has offered her best. She calls it a wedding dowry.” Tadao tried a smile, the gaps in his teeth straining out like dark piano keys. The corners of his lips spooled impossibly wide. “If we cannot trust her, there is no one else, is there?”

 

Hanzo retreated into the cool velvet of his chair and resumed ringing the top of his transparent cage. Tadao reached from the blur of light into focus above his hand. Hanzo’s pull against his skeletal fingers did not fool the man. “There is no dishonor in falling to an opponent this clever,” Tadao urged. He rose from his ashwood chair, his back a sickle curved toward his reclining patron. He flicked his tongue across his lower lip. “Your father would like you to return to school.”

 

The hand trapped below Tadao’s made a fist. Tadao shook his head, movement lingering in his neck, setting his skull wobbling. “There is a great deal of time yet for you to deal with, young Master. Many years before you look like me, and are of no use to anybody.” Tadao released him and hauled himself to the approximation of a man standing. Hanzo noticed only that he had become small, the precise definition of his tendons given way to sags of musty, crocodilian leather. Tadao smirked. “So, I’m afraid you have to get back to work. Genji too.” He tapped two fingers on the front of the desk, the knock of wood on wood. “The elders feel the same about it, if that matters to you. They want you to convince Genji, and to remember it is possible the doctors are right. It could have just been an accident.”

 

“Why would he listen to me?” Hanzo withdrew his hand from the jar of drones.

 

“This is not the end of all things.” Tadao broke his lips on a kinder smile. “I am sure the sparrow will apologize, in his own way. Your father believes--”

 

“He thinks I trust you more than him,” Hanzo spat. “That is why you are here…” Tadao’s eyes popped wide, a doll with all his hair ripped out. “…presuming you may speak to a dragon, thinking our ears hear the prayers and manipulations of men.”

 

“Master.” Tadao steeled the curve of his back, but wine tears gilded his eyes. _The blood of my enemy,_ thought Hanzo. “I have watched you grow as any other man, Sojiro before you, and Genji after. I am blessed to know you as a human. That power is only a tool for your family. You have nothing to gain in pretending otherwise. Please confide in me as you used to. You must not spend your life hiding.”

 

Hanzo grit his pearly teeth. Tadao shivered when that was the Shimada’s only response. “Did I make a mistake?” he wondered, and this time the question was not for his master.

 

“Leave me,” Hanzo demanded. “Call the elders and I will speak with them about these claims of yours. At the very least, they are my blood. That is far more than I can say for the likes of you.”

 

* * *

 

_karroten: look outside_

 

Hanzo stared at the phone glowing to life on the corner of his desk. Why had he even taken it from his bag? Who was he expecting to come calling? The phone wriggled with more entreaties. _Breathe,_ Sojiro’s voice tolled in his head. Hanzo inhaled as he ducked his head toward the breezy invitation of the window. As he exhaled, he took in the glossy hexagonals of the bug screen, and behind them the fiery sprout of Genji’s hair. When Genji discovered he was looking, a white crescent curved across the pixelation of his face.

 

Even having a window for his brother to gargoyle at made no sense. Every other class manifested as a self-contained petri dish for aspiring minds. This lecture sat on the second floor, and the window jutted out of the plasmetal wall, a bare panel of inadequately squashed historical architecture. Genji pulled up his phone to send another text, and the last Hanzo saw of him was the flash of his open hand as he fell from the wall.

 

He groaned through his nose and packed up his things. The professor maintained its lecture through his departure, metal hands uplifted to the rotating holograms of the planets. It pointed to Mars, and a video feed of tomato-colored earth spread across the center of the lecture hall. Another omnic stood in skeletal outline against the sand, a hardhat on its head with the university emblem. It bowed and continued where the first machine left off.

 

“To venture into the political: the personal interest of many omnics in the planet Mars and other extraterrestrial locations could not be understated…”

 

Hanzo closed the door on the anxious giggling of his classmates.

 

Sunlight screamed off the hips of a red convertible parked on the curb. Hanzo shielded his eyes as he rounded the bevel of the lecture building. Genji leaned on the oscillations of daylight striping the passenger door, touched and laughed at by the many waxen hands of his friends. His face and fingers were scratched raw. A boy with dyed golden hair and a white blazer bloomed in the driver’s seat, the only one of his brother’s goons that Hanzo did not recognize.

 

“Father,” was the first word from his mouth as he met Genji. Genji smudged blood off his cheekbone with the back of his hand. Spindly leaves hung from his shirt, lodged beneath his brown leather jacket. Hanzo freed them one at a time.

 

“He is not going anywhere,” Genji sniffled, edging into a grin. His friends all released him to stare at Hanzo, a single octopoidal entity with many pupils. They were chopped hair and dark clothes, aside from the boiling neon of a single girl in a bunny ear headband and a mask of Easter-colored paint. Heterochromic contacts blighted her eyes.

 

“It is a Monday,” Hanzo reported.

 

“How does school help Father?” Genji pouted with a coy lower lip.

 

“Honoring him. Honoring his wishes for you. I explained this.”

 

“But how does that _help_ him?” Genji probed. Hanzo glanced past him, still trying to place the driver. The strange boy folded his arms over the rim of the steering wheel, refusing to even look at the two of them. Genji stretched his neck toward the cold and cloudless sky. “The answer is nothing will help. He will die even if both of us sat at his bedside every day…” He slung his wrist over the bunny girl’s shoulder. “…and prayed for God.” The girl smiled at him, hand feathering the gold bar tagged through a fresh piercing in his earlobe. Genji gazed down his nose at Hanzo before him. “You know I could smell the incense day in and out last time you visited, Brother.”

 

“You are making excuses,” Hanzo snapped. “You know what is right. You proved it when you sent the document I requested.”

 

“Let’s play a game, Hanzo.”

 

“No.”

 

“If you win, I will go to school.” Genji released the girl, tipping his arms out to his sides with a quirk of his brow.

 

Hanzo unshouldered his bag. His brother cautioned him with a raised palm littered by skinny red smears. “If I win, we’re going shopping…” Genji pulled his lips in, wetting them. “Then there is a party tonight…”

 

 “You will not win,” Hanzo snorted. “What is the challenge?”

 

Genji smiled mysteriously.

 

“Sayuki!” he chirped over Hanzo, flailing his arms. The winged pats of her feet on the plastic sidewalk clouded Hanzo’s ears. Of course Genji had summoned her. Of course, like Hanzo, she had been foolish enough to heed his birdsong.

 

He turned, cheeks draining. Sayuki’s heels knocked together as they swung from her hand. Her gray stockings blackened around her feet, shining circuitry up the ruffle of her skirt. Her face blanked at the sight of him, then she twisted to Genji.

 

“Why are you here?” she panted roughly. “Did something happen with your father?”

 

A trace of reflection creased Genji’s features.

 

“Uh, no,” he admitted.

 

Sayuki settled her weight on the flats of her feet, lips hanging open. Her brown eyes scattered across Hanzo before returning to Genji. Her voice pitched deeper as she addressed him again:

 

“What happened to you?”

 

Genji’s eyelashes fluttered, gaze drawing downward. “Did Hanzo do that?” Sayuki asked.

 

“He did it to himself,” Hanzo protested. “Must you always assume it was me?” Genji’s friends lurked silent and motionless through this argument of their betters, frozen in their slight smiles and inconsequential looks, gaping never higher than his or Sayuki’s chests.

 

But Sayuki met his eyes. Her expression slivered thin, and she indexed her hand against the flat of her stomach.

 

“When you came back from holiday, he had a bruise right here.”

 

“We train at home,” he scoffed. “Through his lack of diligence, he did that to himself too.” Sayuki pivoted to Genji for confirmation, and Genji wore the same smile as the rest of his idiot friends. One of the gang jerked to life with a leer.

 

“How do you know what Genji’s stomach looks like, Miss Yanai?” he hooted, and the others infesting the sides of the car giggled. Hanzo noted the driver’s scowling appraisal of the steering wheel.

 

“Who are you?” Sayuki snapped toward the accuser on her tall neck. She glanced down his clothing “Nevermind. Shut up.” Circling her lips to exhale, she returned to the two brothers. Genji hooked a few fingers over Hanzo’s shoulder and leaned up to his ear.

 

“The first one who kisses the driver wins.”

 

The sky of hell was blue, its castles on stilts, its roads made of hardlight and piloted by glossy cherry convertibles. Genji hopped onto the sidewalk, matching Hanzo’s distance from the unsuspecting blond. The thump of his arm mushed at Hanzo’s back. Then Genji sidled toward the convertible alone, red hair, red blood, and red car plate swimming together. Sayuki’s eyes flowed after his movement.

 

The driver blinked at the releasing ping of the convertible door, and Genji smiled at him. The driver’s cheeks puffed pink. Hanzo did recognize him: Kosuke. The boy from the apartment complex down the street. Genji’s friend for many years, before he acquired all these others. Puberty had inspired the pair of them to some sort of falling out, so Hanzo had missed the moment when Kosuke stopped being a bundle of limp, pale baby fat and became a young man. Kosuke must have thought Genji was thicker than the silk he presented, to bother coming back. A beautiful young fool. Even now his eyes lit with regret, and the pain dried down his burning cheeks as Genji neared.

 

Hanzo sprang after his brother, over the wing of the convertible.

 

“What are you Shimadas doing?!” Sayuki shrieked. Their legs kicked for purchase against the hanging door, their weights counterbalanced. Kosuke shrank against the far wall as Genji’s serene smirk curtained beside Hanzo’s glower of concentration. Hanzo shoved Genji aside as he teetered across the cupholder. Kosuke fumbled at the door handle and his seatbelt. Hanzo seized the front of his snowy blazer.

 

He dragged the boy up, but the seatbelt caught across Kosuke’s collarbone, propping him perfectly for the resurgent carp of Genji to lock onto his lips. Lines of Genji’s blood trickled between their mouths. Genji clasped his cheeks. Kosuke’s knuckles turned white around the door handle. The two of them stopped resembling children. They were streaks of sunlight and autumn bleeding into each other. Genji left evidence of himself everywhere. Kosuke swallowed once, twice, and put his hands on Genji’s chest.

 

“You’re all salty,” he mumbled as Genji released him.

 

“More later, you think?” Genji inquired. Kosuke’s blush darkened. He peeped at Hanzo, who recalled his own body in the car with them, just as tangled and desperate.

 

“But you said your brother w--”

 

“Later,” Genji corrected. A pink stream leaked from the corner of Kosuke’s mouth as he nodded feebly.

 

“Genji _who is that._ ” Sayuki. Hanzo remembered, and dragged his fingers through his hair on reflex. Genji peered over his shoulder and dismissed the question with a wag of his hand. Her face staggered and wrinkled by some terrible power, Sayuki tracked her way to Hanzo. “Get out of the car,” she advised, making pointed glances around the campus.

 

“It’s Tokyo! No one cares,” Genji laughed. He squinted at his friends piled around the convertible. “You guys want to keep hanging out with me, don’t you?” They offered scattered agreement. “Then you don’t care.”

 

Hanzo freed himself from the passenger seat, backing from the car door and fixing his clothing. Sayuki stepped over to help him. Genji rotated into the car’s limousine-style back and waved the others in around him.

 

“Want to party, Sayu?” he offered. Sayuki reviewed the contents of the car. The passenger seat was empty-- right next to Kosuke, who was fingering his lips.

 

“Seems there are no seats left,” she frosted the air. Genji leaned back and patted his thighs.

 

“I am sure we can find a seat for you, beautiful~”

 

Hanzo pulled out his phone.

 

“I will call mine,” he told Sayuki, and she nodded, turning away from Genji.

 

Genji texted him a GPS node and the convertible floated off the streetside, coasting into the sky. Sayuki said nothing as they arranged themselves in Hanzo’s jet-colored sedan. She wound her heels back on while Hanzo locked his phone into a storage slot. He tracked the convertible manually.

 

As they flew across the middle of town, Sayuki sighed. He found her staring down the curve of the tinted window at the lights and people and ocean drifting past below them.

 

“I can’t even call it youth,” she said. “You were never like that.” Hanzo turned back to the stream of traffic, the many prisms of the city making comets in his eyes.

 

“He completed the finances I sent him,” he muttered.

 

“Really? They were correct?”

 

Hanzo nodded.

 

“He must think he has bought himself a measure of happiness.”

 

“Let him have it,” she proposed, and he raised an eyebrow. “If he is willing to do the work, it means he is finally thinking about the future.”

 

“You are too optimistic.” Hanzo parked the car beside an outlet strip, eyeing the performers and mascots coloring the sidewalk with distaste. Genji marched his troop of ogres inside one of the clothing stores. “I should not have to teach him these things.” A building at the intersection was under construction. The hole where it came up through the street was wide enough for him to see its roots dropping down into the Pacific. Sojiro said that everything was getting swallowed by the ocean. Even Hanamura, someday.

 

Sayuki covered his hand on the parking gear with her own.

 

“None of this is fair, is it Hanzo?” she prompted, gentle, but her eyes were sharp for any yield in his expression. He glanced at the clutch of her hard fingers between his: she contracted the points of her hand as he looked, tightening against the most fragile creases of his skin like a symphony of bowstrings. From the join of them he surveyed to the newest tiger tail netted on her thigh, curling just under the edge of her skirt. “I did not tell you how sorry I am yet,” she said.

 

“About what?”

 

“Your dad.”

 

Her arm slipped up his, hand cooling the crux of his back and neck. Hanzo’s shoulders spiked. Sayuki bent her head against his chest until he could discover nothing dangerous in the contact, until he relaxed under her hands.

 

“Do you…” he stammered. His thoughts kept trailing to Kosuke’s bright cheeks set off by the red of the convertible.

 

“I am just hugging you,” she soothed. “I am not asking for something.” She threaded her fingers through his hair, toying out the mint of his conditioner. “You spend too much time around Genji.” Tipping her face up, letting the dark of her bangs fall back, she added, “Though…maybe you should practice?” Hanzo inspected her mouth. She did not smile like the woman Genji brought him.

 

Women could be different, he supposed.

 

Since returning to the university, he shared a number of classes with a girl who had been raised in a flophouse and completed the entry exams by self-teaching. He studied with her, and studied her, though he was careful not to mention her to anyone, even Genji. She did not seem to know that the Kamagasaki gang her father ran with was one of the Clan’s regional operations, or even that Shimada was a notorious name, which was strange because she was very smart. She got flustered whenever he tried talking to her about anything besides their sciences. It was irritating. But in those moments where she withstood the gravitas of his presence…

 

He kissed Sayuki. Her chest sank, her nose exhaling across his cheek. She nudged across the sedan’s divider and drove him against the padded leather. Just this one kiss, for a lifetime. He spread his thumbs up her shoulderblades, fingers daggering into her blouse.

 

They released in a gasp. He could see the pebbling in her skin. She curled her lower lip in, sucking on it before releasing the coral furl with a new gloss of moisture. Hanzo thumbed her balm from the corners of his mouth. Sayuki blinked rapidly, fingertips dimpling the front of his blazer. Her eyes ticked away to the window behind him.

 

Genji knocked on the tinting, demanding they join the festivities.

 

Hanzo woke up.

 

His room in the Castle had the crushed maple odor of the world’s first garden. He could run his fingers along the walls and point to each cranny full of tea leaves and copper. But this world changed as he passed through it, as he opened his eyes a little more. His memories lingered on him like a stain.

 

He sat up from a bed of lavender cotton, boxed by walls of limestone tattoo plaster. A grated stone on the bedside table pushed pineapple vapor at the air until he reached over and switched it off. He covered his nose and mouth with the back of his wrist.

 

A couple meters from the foot of the bed, a cavern rose from the sea. Within its briny foyer, a woman lay collapsed upon a boulder. Seaweed climbed from the waves to garland her ankles. The solar plate behind her head baked rose highlights across the stone walls. Floods of jellyfish bubbled around her toes, the ocean born from their tangling electric strings. The woman’s tears foamed across the ground into the finest petals of sword glass, each chunk reflecting the light of her figure beneath her robes. She was radiant, but trapped in that cave, and outside raged a storm of a thousand years. The hologram shuffled its cel layers, heightening its illusion of depth.

 

Hanzo swallowed, and tangled his hand under the long hair covering the back of his neck. He bent his leg, sheet falling away, and rested his arm on his knee as he looked across the bed. His lips pressed together, unable to frown, or smile, or speak. After a while he turned to the floor to find his clothing. Checked the watch he snapped around his wrist: first lecture was two hours ago. Texted the estate for Sojiro’s condition: no developments. Found a makeup remover in the medicine cabinet and burned the stale offspring of cologne and sweat from his throat.

 

The house looked foreign with daylight pounding on the digital blinds, but he followed the checker tiles downstairs to the kitchen. He raided the pantry to secure a jar of umeboshi marked five years aged. The pop of the lid was a ridiculously happy sound to him.

 

Genji’s bunny girl denned alone on a bench outside the pantry. Hanzo craned over her: her eyes did not move at all beneath their caps of mascara. He shoved her off the bench and sat down, crossing his legs as he nursed the sour wrinkles of red plums. Low smacks and undisguised grunts marked the dragon’s breakfast. When he was finished, he pouched one umeboshi in a napkin, and screwed the jar lid on the rest.

 

He stepped outside, blinking in the fresh wave of light across the porch.

 

Asymmetric arteries of miniature trees dotted the gravel lawn. The leaning polygonal of the house sketched the garden’s only boulder. Genji tucked himself in a shirtless ball on the porch steps. The translucent banister propped his body semi-upright, the tongues of his belt hanging down his thighs. Hanzo arranged himself beside his brother. Genji roused, smiled blearily, and curled back into his knees. Hanzo rested a hand on his back, absorbing the flutters of his heart. His fingers edged into an umbrella of bruising on Genji’s rib cage, and searched down the bones. Nothing felt broken.

 

He unwrapped the umeboshi. Genji sniffed, pinching his eyes at the sun. He wavered nose-first at Hanzo, and Hanzo held out the gift. Genji gobbled it right off his hand, suckling out the vinegar and undulating with a shudder that opened his eyes wide.

 

“Uwauooh,” Genji groaned at the sky, a wolf’s morning lament for the departing night. He staggered up, his pants tight enough to stick to his hips even without the assistance of his belt. Hanzo watched him limp to apparent privacy at the corner of the garden, and listened to the dull retches across a pair of bonsai maples, then Genji’s humming as he watered the plants. He prepped a command as Genji reappeared, but Genji stumped past on his own, entering the house to wash.

 

His brother returned having located his jacket but not his shirt, darker only on the fringes of his torso. He tweaked his red spikes as he plopped onto the step beside Hanzo. He continued messing with his hair until Hanzo obligingly pivoted toward him.

 

“I want to change it,” Genji explained. “I don’t like this color.”

 

“What color do you like?” Hanzo asked. Genji panned at him, then chucked his knuckles under his jawline and squatted down to investigate the white plastic grain of the porch steps.

 

“Green,” he claimed. Hanzo snorted. Genji lifted his head, following the stream of gold foil stepping stones from the porch to the car dock at the edge of the lawn. Hanzo’s sedan hung there like an eyeless crow. Genji smushed the round of his palm along his temple, body wobbly on his throne. He twisted to Hanzo, scooching closer. “You had fun?” Hanzo smiled at him. Genji blushed, and closed both hands to fists. “Just…now you must learn how to do it on your own.”

 

“I know how to entertain guests,” Hanzo bristled, and Genji shook his head.

 

“I meant have fun.”

 

“You are fun enough for the both of us.” He stuck his arm over Genji’s shoulders. “Are you going somewhere?” he joked. Genji leaned out of his grip, into the cool slant of the banister, leaving Hanzo’s dry laughter to announce the morning alone. Hanzo set his brow at the reluctant imp. “Throwing a single coin into the river of a god will not curry his favor, no matter what you have been told.”

 

Genji pushed his wrist into the architecture, gripped the top of it with his hand. Hanzo wondered if he had been searching the wrong place for injuries. “The men told me that last week you handled three different clients on Father’s behalf,” he told Genji. “And you behaved appropriately at all of those occasions. Even Uncle vouched for your usefulness. And your work on the ledger was accurate.” Hanzo paused, letting Genji sit himself upright. “I forgive you,” he announced.

 

Genji’s chin sank to his knees and he smiled into his own bones. He snaked his arms around his legs. Hanzo cleared his throat to remind him to correct his posture, but Genji spoke:

 

“Have you ever thought about running away, Hanzo?”

 

His younger brother crooked his head over, eyes bright.

 

The pale shock through Hanzo’s face turned over into a baring of teeth.

 

“Do you take everything I say and spit it back?” he rasped, etiquette lessons precluding a shout. Genji maintained his lips in a soft, masking line. “I just said you have accomplished your duties correctly,” Hanzo persisted, trying to pry reality from this cloudtop garden inhabited by his insane brother. He recalled something so far away now it might have been another life: “Sayuki put you up to this.” Genji’s face finally imperfected, his confusion shining in godly wrinkles beneath the sun.

 

“I haven’t told her,” he mumbled. “I wanted to tell you though. Because…Hanzo…do you…?”

 

“ _Don’t say it._ ” Hanzo covered his face. “We have our responsibilities,” he hissed through his fingers. “Our family--”

 

“You said they might have been the ones that hurt Father,” Genji interrupted, gaining volume. “I don’t want to be in a family like that.” Hanzo shook his head. “That was what you said,” Genji insisted.

 

“They have been so close to us these past months, I know better now,” Hanzo growled. Genji blinked, started to smile. “They are only smart and brave enough to take advantage of the discord, not to initiate.” The smile vacated. Hanzo eyed his brother. “I did think about running away once. I told you when I thought of it.” Genji’s face lit, but the joy of victory did not return to him. He was pleasantly blank. “You don’t remember?” Hanzo asked with an oily fury. “I said I would take you, and we would live by the river.”

 

Genji rubbed at his eyeliner, thinking at the ground. “It was because of Father,” Hanzo called to him, and when he looked up the rest came in a snarl. “Because he was a coward, and it made him _disorderly._ ”

 

“Why did you not go through with it?” Genji hummed, ignoring the rest. Hanzo deflated, but answered.

 

“It was winter…” he grumbled, head flagging up at the first lines of frost inking through the current sky. “By spring, he returned as flowers do.” He looked at his fist, circling his thumb over the damaged creases of his fingers. “Or that was the appearance he put on.” He set his face at Genji. “I don’t want to hear about this dream of yours ever again.”

 

Genji pulled out his phone, checking his texts, typing new ones with his thumbs. Like Hanzo had disappeared. “What is it?” he spat as Genji’s fingers stabbed urgently across the light. Genji’s eyes rolled toward him.

 

“Sayuki told me last night she would send a car so I can get back to the train, but she isn’t replying to my texts,” he whined.

 

Hanzo grasped at his temples, only to sag in a curtain of black hair moments later.

 

“You need not bother her,” he grunted. “I will drive you.”

 

* * *

 

He dodged the town car waiting for him at the station. Tadao would know better than to panic. Snowflakes matted across his hair the moment he left the linoleum shelter.

 

He walked home through an uncommon blizzard, toting his modest suitcase in his right hand, parsing his phone with the left. Swiped his thumb across the screen to clear its misted glow. Details of Sojiro’s two most recent cardiac events flashed beneath the clouded evening. Strips of Christmas lights corralled the apartment fencing at either side of the street, and other travelers passed him in wooly suits. Hanzo preferred the cold, and made do with a striped scarf and gloves. The guards at the castle gate frantically texted their superiors when he showed up. He traveled to the tallest of the layered spires, wood dyed gray by the season. His journeys melted across the lamp-lit corridors until he reached Sojiro’s olive doorframe.

 

Genji coiled at Sojiro’s ribs, arm weighted across the shallow jerks of the man’s chest. Sojiro opened his eyes at the tap of Hanzo’s wet shoes. Hanzo surveyed his brother as he circled around the bedframe to the redwood chair at the side.

 

“He comes and goes,” Sojiro cackled behind his ventilator mask, clawing his fingers through Genji’s green hair. “Makes it all the sweeter when he deigns to share his company.” Genji buried his face deeper in the folds of his orange scarf. The accessory layered above a hideous lime seasonal sweater. Hanzo scanned the thermostat on the wall and found it operational. Genji’s sleeves were so long his fingers merely poked from the ends like baby carrots. His bare feet tangled around each other.

 

Hanzo braced his hand over the polished wooden back of the visitor’s chair. He wanted nothing but to sit.

 

But he laid his suitcase against the wall and went to the guard at the door, retrieving the tablet he had asked him to prepare. The guard left after, closing the door behind him.

 

He ignored Sojiro’s questions about the state of his clothes as he composed himself in the chair. Sojiro’s closest arm had been sacrificed to IV lines and sensors, but it meant he could hold Genji nakedly with the other. Hanzo looked away to investigate his tablet. “Hanzo,” Sojiro prompted. Hanzo lifted his face at the occupant of the bed to indicate he could speak. “Where is Yasu?”

 

“I fired her.”

 

Sojiro searched his dyeless cotton ceiling. “What do you need?” Hanzo inquired. He might not wear a golden dress while he did it, but he could brew tea. Sojiro weighed an angular frown at him.

 

“A pair of breasts would be nice,” he croaked. Hanzo withered, and they held a bitter, silent standoff. He was the one to break down at his tablet again, typing shortly, then turning it around and showing his father the hologram. Sojiro’s watery eyes thinned at the image. “You have terrible taste.”

 

Hanzo shifted the tablet’s contents back to his original objective and tipped it to flash on Sojiro’s periphery. He received a view of thick ebony hair for his trouble.

 

“Sojiro.”

 

His father rolled back over, inhaled, and held his breath as he scanned the lines. Hanzo scrolled toward the verification, but Sojiro’s festooned arm of more plastic than skin wrenched up to stop him. He held onto Hanzo’s fingers, breath returning in wheezes. Hanzo obligingly scrolled back up.

 

“What is that?” Sojiro groused. He struggled his hand off Hanzo’s and pointed at the offending marks. “Why did you strike the philanthropy?”

 

“That much does not help us,” Hanzo explained. “This is the percentage we need to maintain appearances.”

 

“And you send the excess to the operation in Kamagasaki?” Sojiro coughed. “Just as much a charity. We only go to Osaka so the locals don’t get any ideas.” His face slacked, eyes shuttered, and he choked on his own saliva, blowing it across his lower lip. His infection had pooled in his viscera, hollowed him out, turned his throat into a flute full of holes. Attacked his heart relentlessly, but left his skin and bones. _How unusual,_ the doctors gushed over the pattern. Machines behaving like beasts, forsaking efficiency for nutritional content they did not need. When people wished to leave beautiful corpses, Sojiro was what they wished for. “Did I forget to teach you both to be good men?” Sojiro wondered in a faint radio gurgle.

 

“Good how?” Hanzo demanded. Sojiro smiled at him through the gloss of the ventilator. He went down the tablet with his plastic-wrapped fingers, undoing the conservative percentage adjustments.

 

“All the people of this world are yours, so you have to be just to them.”

 

“Does that include the ones murdering each other with our guns, drowning themselves in our drugs?” Hanzo asked, thin-lipped.

 

“Yes…” Sojiro’s focus drifted. “Even the wolves.” His eyes sprang to Hanzo’s with new, momentary light. “Because--”

 

“I do not want a story, Sojiro.”

 

His father shrank, and pinned his finger to the bottom of the tablet to slop out a signature. His eyes closed halfway through, so Hanzo took his hand and steered it to finish the strokes of his name. He set the tablet aside on a dresser.

 

After a time, Sojiro returned to the world of the living. He looked to Genji first, squeezing his shoulder. Then he searched Hanzo sitting at his other side, eyebrows wrinkling as he discovered the tablet in its new position, glowing with his completed kanji.

 

“I’m the one drowning in all our drugs. There’s none left for anyone else to ruin their lives with. The issue is solved,” he joked, curling his fingers at the pincushion of his wrist, shaking his arm out to the rainbow of IV bags. Hanzo allowed a smirk, his image duplicated across each of the plastic baggies.

 

Sojiro lowered his temple to his pillow, gaze shrinking to a couple dark slivers watching Hanzo over his breathing cup. “I don’t see the doctors. I guess they are taking a break for the holidays,” he laughed, a metallic squeak. “Maybe you and I should take advantage of their absence and rip these things free. Put my greed to rest, hm?” His voice returned to his deep and chipper norm, eyes widening until Hanzo could see the gray in them.

 

The jest faded from Hanzo’s face first. Sojiro smiled at him, desperately.

 

“Father,” Hanzo gasped. “You know I can’t.” He took Sojiro’s hand, but his father’s fingers hung limp and cold against him.

 

After a moment, Sojiro spoke again:

 

“I apologize.” His other hand stroked Genji’s hair, caressing the round of his skull beneath. Hanzo followed the gesture, throat contracting, unable to swallow. “I would never ask him,” Sojiro interjected. Hanzo crossed his hands over his mouth and nose, shading a couple fingers over his eyes when they darted toward his sleeping brother again. “This must be difficult for you,” Sojiro said somewhere distant from him. The man extended his half-mechanical hand. “Hanzo…” he called, voice thinning.

 

Genji woke. He did not say anything, but took the hand collapsed in his hair and checked its pulse. Then he sat up and performed the same exam at Sojiro’s neck, under the unkempt pepper gristle of his beard. The machines around Sojiro broadcast the quivers of his heart in neon detail, and had been stable since Hanzo entered. Yet Genji hit the red call button on the bedpost, and hopped off the mattress.

 

He circled around the bed and took Hanzo’s wrists. Hanzo resisted him, frowning.

 

“You can’t be in the way,” Genji told him in an oddly exhausted monotone. One of the machines beeped. Sojiro’s pupils shrank.

 

“Take Genji out of the room,” he ordered Hanzo, who blinked dully as Genji hauled him out of the chair. Blue physicians burst through the door, and Genji tugged Hanzo between the waves of them. Sojiro started coughing and Hanzo looked over his shoulder in time to see his father’s torso pulse through a snake-like arch. Sojiro’s breath broke in a groan, and it was the loudest sound Hanzo had ever heard him make.

 

Then he was out in the hallway, and the door closed behind him. Genji pulled him into his arms, embracing him, while he could only stand limply on stone feet.

 

“Is he dying?” Hanzo asked after Sojiro failed to suppress a scream on the other side of the door. Genji rested his face on Hanzo’s shoulder.

 

“Not yet.” His fingers crushed into the snow-soaked cloth of Hanzo’s bicep. Their uncles came running into the amber light of the foyer, sketches of charcoal, silk, and bloodless skin. They had not a hair out of place. Their clothing came from a picture book of lords from long ago.

 

“Again?” the first demanded as Sojiro choked behind the door.

 

“You should have told him to be stronger,” the second ordered Hanzo. “The whole house can hear him.” He hovered the back of his sleeve across his lips and nose, lowering his hand only to pull the two brothers apart. He needled around Genji’s shoulders to restrain him. Genji brushed his eyes at Hanzo’s as the older man ripped off his scarf. “What are you wearing?” their elder barked, pushing Genji away as soon as the offending accessory had been removed. “Dress properly before all these strangers.” He gestured at Genji’s body. “Clean that awful color from your hair.”

 

“And you,” Uncle said, frowning at Hanzo. “Your attire is a mess. I heard you chose walking over the transportation sent for you. For what reason?”

 

Hanzo opened his mouth. The film cleared from Genji’s eyes; his brother stared at him. The physicians must have managed to sedate the Master of the Shimada, because Sojiro’s voice died like the final puff of a candle, and the clinking of delicate tools began. Genji turned to the door.

 

“What are you doing?” Uncle complained, his anger tight in his throat but slippery in the air. “Go and make yourself presentable.”

 

“He is right,” Hanzo said as Genji ignored the command and pushed at the door. Genji closed his eyes. “We cannot show weakness now,” Hanzo continued, more plaintive, trying to get his brother to look at him again.

 

“Of course he is right,” Uncle snorted, erecting his spine straighter to show that even in agreement, he was taller than his counterpart. “Go.”

 

When Hanzo departed down the hall, Genji followed him.

 

He restricted Genji’s visits to Sojiro after that, and instructed the guards to include a man at their meetings.

 

No matter what Sojiro promised, Hanzo knew that he was weak.

 

* * *

 

Three days after Sojiro died, Hanzo blocked out time in his schedule to go to Genji’s room. It was late morning, and Genji sat in a dark gray suit in front of his mirror, straightening his mint hair. He had taken to wearing his professional attire after the constant heckling of their visiting family. His scarf knotted around the lower half of his face like a contagion mask.

 

“Let me,” Hanzo ordered, and Genji relinquished the comb with a grunt. Their father’s eyes followed Hanzo in the mirror. Hanzo examined Genji’s roots, and traded the comb for the dye bottle on the dresser. He bit his lip as he unscrewed the cap, the perfume of the unsettled fluid shooting straight up his face. Genji could have used any of the nanite products, but preferred the less modern dyes. It was perhaps the only old-fashioned thing about him. Even with the sacrifice to his skin, running his hands through Genji’s unstyled bangs encouraged Hanzo’s smile. “I see you have settled on enraging the family. I expect you will avoid lipstick, at least.” He teetered on the edge of a joke.

 

“Did you want something?”

 

Genji’s voice sounded different behind his scarf. Hanzo studied him in the mirror. It was not Sojiro on the glass, but something stern and resolved. His fingers tightened around Genji’s hair.

 

“After the funeral, you will join the meetings with me,” he instructed.

 

“You are not Father. You cannot command me,” Genji answered in a deep wrench of his vocal cords. “I told you my decision already. Sayuki will help you.” Hanzo clutched the green flames, their neon fiber tangling in his fingerjoints.

 

“If I allowed her to--”

 

“No, Brother.” Genji relaxed into the drag of Hanzo’s grip, soft again. “I don’t want to make a mess. I want to slip quietly from this life.” His warm hand shined across Hanzo’s. “You can still walk with me.”

 

“I will never be part of your aimless kingdom!” Hanzo released Genji’s hair, the weathering of his palms moist with remnants of the dye, sticky like saltwater. “This Castle is our purpose. It is the only place where you have a use.” Genji blinked, and reached for the styling gel abutting the mirror. Hanzo clamped his wrist and pinned his arm to the dresser top. “Every day, our uncles ask why you are not at the table with me. Every day, I must make excuses. You are sick. You are overcome from Father’s death. Every day, lies.” Genji shivered under him. Hanzo frowned. “Today Great-uncle called you weak. You must answer him, show him he is wrong!”

 

Genji threw off the restraint, breath quickening as he sat up from his chair. His grimace strained from the loosening layers of his scarf. Hanzo took a step back to allow himself room to ready his posture. He raised his hands to defensive positions. Genji blinked at the dye staining his fingernails.

 

He grabbed onto Hanzo’s forearm. Hanzo missed the block.

 

Genji took no advantage. The fire left his eyes. He lowered his head.

 

“I will come visit you, Brother.”

 

The next day during his funeral planning with the elders, a guard rushed through the room and bent to Hanzo’s ear. Genji was on top of the family shrine, serenading the village about imaginary prostitutes. When Hanzo brought him down, he puked his guts out in the middle of the courtyard, along with a few cups of wine from the century cellar. While the elders looked on from the shaded terrace, Hanzo ordered the men to escort Genji to his room. He posted two guards to the inner door. Genji’s meals would be brought.

 

* * *

 

The voices of his family died around him as an electronic heartbeat throbbed through the walls. Glitter swept beneath the doorframe in alien pulses, puffing across Hanzo’s dress shoes. His tongue lodged dry and swollen in the back of his throat. He placed his hand on the red door, but could not summon the strength to open it. Heat coursed through the wood, a wildfire waiting on the other side.

 

Hanzo let go and snapped his fingers at two guards at the far end of the hall. They waded through the suits of the Shimada Clan. The impish smile on the man in charge of the meeting room door faded as the others apprehended him by his elbows.

 

“Take him below,” Hanzo ordered. “Confiscate everything, and find out _what he paid him._ Leave him when you are done. I will deal with him later.”

 

The captured man trembled, as much surprise as fear, and squeaked out a “Master” before calloused hands clamped over his mouth and nose.

 

Hanzo pretended to inspect the door. It gave him time to hold his hand against his heart, which kept unfolding and splitting inside him like a kaleidoscope. His insides went cold. He waited until the last piggish bleating of his first prisoner faded around the corner to turn to his family. “Excuse me,” he said in heavily adjusted politeness and volume.

 

He opened the door.

 

Arms and ribcages and faces smashed together on the wall just left of the doorframe. Laboratory pink and hospital blue irises watched him over a rocking shoulder. Stripes of empty bottles spun on the ruined floor. A synthesizer cut through the great hall in blaring spurts of percussion. Laundry hung from the statues and side tables, cobbled wires of aquamarine Christmas lights injecting the air with the eyes of ghosts. Incense bowed beside sake. Shadows of fledging children shrieked long and stick-like up the corners. The Clan milled in the open doorway, allowing Hanzo to trace the disturbance alone.

 

Overturned shot-glasses peppered the closest end of the meeting table, its wood tongue sliding away into the darkness. Hanzo followed a tunnel of wind between the dancing bodies of teenagers to the table’s head, where the waves of electrified limbs parted to show him who sat in his chair.

 

Genji licked a cherry blossom petal off the grain of the table. One of the Shimada brands, floating down his throat as he sat up straight. He washed its journey with a green bottle from the cellar. Gauze-rimmed eyes passed over Hanzo and dripped off, blind. Genji fit an arm to the back of the other boy in his lap. He wore the funeral suit Hanzo had picked out for him, but it was torn straight through the sleeves, and deformed in the legs. Genji had leapt from his window to escape, pretending he had wings.

 

His brother looked at him again as he separated from the blue halo of the holiday strings. Genji lifted the other boy and slammed him over the edge of the table, crushing perfumed ferment from the cherry blossoms scattered there. Hanzo recognized Kosuke, even if his hair hung silver today like an old man, tips done in violet. Kosuke folded a hasty origami at the front of Genji’s pants to spare his modesty from the other partygoers. Had Genji even told him their father was dead? Genji pressed on Kosuke thick and consuming as a serpent, fastening to his lips, staring over his pink face at Hanzo.

 

Security budged into the room behind the Clan. They collected teenagers and strays from the corners, the room yipping and cheeping under the rhythm of the subwoofer. Men in suits paraded trespassers past the elders in various states of undress. Someone killed the sound system, and a hush broke the mealy air. Kosuke tipped his head back. He spotted Hanzo, and yelped under Genji’s mouth. Genji separated from him with his tongue hanging, and that oozing trail became a grin at Hanzo.

 

“I decided to come help you with the meeting, Brother,” he announced to the silence. “Like you asked.” Kosuke’s hand cracked across his face, and the other boy kicked his way off the table, practically leaping into the arms of the guards. A red string pulsed from Genji’s nose, splintering across his mouth. “Maybe you forgot when you locked me up, but I’m an assassin, dumbass.”

 

The guards spread across the crimson egg of the walls. The Clan filtered through the trash piles on the floor to stand at Hanzo’s back. His uncles’ breath lit his neck. Genji sat back in his seat until the last of his audience took their places. He adjusted the fit of his ragged suit with familiar motions.

 

He rose from the chair. “Today my target is the Shimada Clan.” He glided in front of Hanzo, evaluating his stance. “It is an easy job-- a garden full of maggots.” Every muscle in Hanzo’s body was a coward clenching to stone. Genji’s head dropped. He swayed on his feet.

 

His arm turned viper and crunched a fist into Hanzo’s jaw.

 

Hanzo collapsed against the table, then fell to the floor. Genji hopped after him, grabbing his shoulder as a steadying point so he could aim another punch. His face was a shadow etched by blue light. Hanzo smelled the cherry and beer on his breath. His web of iced over tendons broke free, and he came alive.

 

He countered the weight of his brother’s oncoming arm. Elbowed him in the stomach. Genji’s sweat foamed across his wrist as Hanzo tackled him off, finding his feet. Great-uncle’s three-fingered hand lifted in the techno-radiance, stopping the guards from breaking them apart. Genji’s forehead slammed into his. His lashed weight relieved Hanzo of his newfound balance. They rolled on the floor like the chance meeting of two rabid wolves. Flirted blows at the curves of each other’s bones. He nailed a single clean strike into Genji’s eye socket.

 

Genji stammered a groan, swiping his open hand blindly. He ripped out Hanzo’s hair. Hanzo chopped his shoulder and his arm dropped numb to the floor.

 

He got up. Genji coiled his working hand after him, and Hanzo kicked under his reach, flattening into his ribs. Genji spluttered leftover blood from his nose on the floor and collapsed, staying down.

 

Hanzo straightened to his full height. Adjusted his clothing. Undid his tie from his red neck. His uncles flanked to his shoulders, holding their hands atop him in quiet support.

 

He could never remember exactly which one pressed the handle of the knife into his hand.

 

“Now you have to,” Genji gurgled, closing the bruising blue complex of his eyes. He smiled at Hanzo from the floor, all teeth.

 

“Now you have to,” Uncle agreed at his ear.

 

“You have to let me go,” Genji finished in a pant, his green hair tattered across the boards like loose blades of grass. He spit across a stack of empty candy wrappers and curled around himself.

 

Hanzo loosened a button at the front of his jacket with his free hand, cleared the rumples from his sleeves, tested the front of his trousers for unsightly wrinkles. Only then did he slip a finger onto the blade, confirming it, opening his own capillary into a lightning strike that soaked down his back. He inhaled, and throughout his life, the world knotted into his lungs. He never exhaled again.

 

He asked the men to gather Genji from the floor and return him to his room. Bar the windows. Chain him. Yet when Genji was dragged away smiling, the Clan glared at him, not the miscreant.

 

At him.

 

“So you are Sojiro, after all,” Great-uncle coughed as he cleared Christmas lights from the back of his seat at the table.

 

After meeting with the elders late into the night, Hanzo went to the suite he shared with his brother. He evicted the men guarding the inner door. He rested his hand on the wood, and all was still and cold. Hanzo pushed it open. The knife remained in his hand, bent upright behind his spine now.

 

The crease of Genji’s elbow covered all his face beyond one closed eye as he slept in his bed. Flickers of pumice gel circled the visible niche of his face like an iridescent eyeshadow, and most of the swelling had already vanished. Genji dreamed. His fingers worked into his dirty sheets, and the muscle down his bruised abdomen clenched. The blue streak of his blanket bisected the lively peach clay of his skin. His shed clothing bunched at his ankle, caught on the bloated cuff locking him to the window bars.

 

His eyelashes flickered as Hanzo’s silhouette shifted back and forth across him, piecemeal in the moonlight. His eyes opened wide and found his older brother.

 

“What are you doing?!” he yelled at the shadow.

 

Hanzo remained where he was, staring. Genji riled up from the bed. “What the hell are you doing?!” Hanzo turned away and went down the hall to his room, Genji chirping after him, “Hanzo! HANZO!”

 

* * *

 

The lock on his cage decoupled again the next night, rousing Genji. He rolled over on his growling stomach, debating if he should answer the metal call. Maybe Hanzo would make him apologize before feeding him. He had to decide if that was a worthy sacrifice. Tomorrow was…funeral. There would be food there.

 

He eyed the underside of the door, but the hallway windows must have had their blinds turned down. The blurry shimmer of the moon that made it beneath the doorframe did not let him read if Hanzo was waiting out there. Tears came out of his eyes. He did not know why. He scraped them away hastily.

 

His tummy complained again. Genji cursed his lack of discipline. If only Hanzo knew how many laments he held private, they might have come close to understanding each other. He smiled bitterly as the door finally cracked apart.

 

One of the guards entered-- an older one, but not disfigured by the wisdom of his years like Tadao. He walked stiffly at the bed. Genji withdrew to the other side of the mattress, pulling his blanket after. The guard’s standard issue winked beneath his jacket as he bent across the sheets. He unlocked the bracelet around Genji’s ankle with a card key, then departed, closing the door behind him. Genji did not detect the clunk of the lock finding home again.

 

He crept out of bed, shaking his rags from his abraded ankle, and went to the door. He tested the handle, and the door creaked lightly away from its frame.

 

At his feet sat a white bag. The hallway was empty. Genji pulled up a blind and crouched within the rectangle of moonlight. He picked the bag up, shifting it around the top of his arms: clothing, but the familiar chill of his breastplate and weapons too. He carried it to his bed to open it, finding on top a note:

 

_TWO DRAGONS_

Genji smiled.

 

His phone was in the bag too, but wiped of all contacts and service cancelled. _You did not have to go so far,_ he thought as he cleansed his body under the shower head. Out of curiosity, he checked his wardrobe: empty. Sighing, Genji put on the uniform from the bag. Hanzo did have the courtesy to include the scarf he hated. He re-packed the bag and used its string to hang it from his arm like a purse, and headed through the smoky night to the family shrine.

 

* * *

 

It was important that he came as bid.

 

It was important that Genji understood.

 

Hanzo watched him cross the wide wooden dais. Genji failed to notice him in the shadows of the upper balcony, stooping forward to minimize his silhouette.

 

Genji stopped before the mural of the two warriors. A golden dragon weaved through the clouds behind the pair of men as they laid their backs together and fought off unseen enemies. It was an imitation of a painting Sojiro kept in his room. He had been obsessed with it since Mother died. Genji gawped at it like a child, and planted his bag at the base of the supporting wall. He moseyed around the corner into the dojo.

 

Hanzo followed.

 

The lights were intentionally disabled inside. Genji had to circle the entire perimeter to twist active each of the orange lamps. He squatted in the back to toy with one which was missing its fake flame. Hanzo stepped through one of the two exits and tossed the plastic piece Genji needed on the floor.

 

Whatever greeting Genji had in mind died on his lips when he saw Hanzo.

 

Hanzo wore a uniform like his, but river blue. The color of his work, and his responsibilities. His sword reclined in a scabbard on his back, its tail curving behind his head, the reflection of Genji’s own weapon.

 

“I only thought you wanted to say goodbye,” Genji revived after a moment, and moved toward him. The metal talons on his boots scratched along the ancient wood. “Are you coming with me after all?”

 

Genji held out his gloved hand.

 

Hanzo evaluated the line from his palm to his shoulder, the sculpt of the muscle bared around his elbow. Genji’s fingers curled at the examination. Hanzo drew his sword. “Or you can cast me out,” Genji offered jovially. “Lay your curses upon me. Father enjoyed those.”

 

“Where are you?” Hanzo demanded. Genji’s face softened, his arm fell, but he summoned it straight again.

 

“Brother?”

 

“I don’t see you,” Hanzo moaned. Genji’s fingers strained toward him.

 

“Hanzo,” he called, but all Hanzo heard was static. “Please…” Eyebrows connived together, cheeks bunched, the mouth was wide and pert. Imitations of humanity, which should be elegant and orderly. Hanzo could see the pale under the blood vessels in Genji’s face. Genji was nothing but moonlight in human form, trying to trick him. He swung his sword out at the weak point, at begging, at _please._

 

Genji’s outstretched hand snaked back over his shoulder and drew his sword to meet the blow. “You are a fool,” he swore, and it was Sojiro’s voice. _Genji_ was the thinner, raspy accusation that spurted out after, “You stupid bastard!” Genji needed to work himself up to it.

 

Because he was weak.

 

Hanzo flicked the weakling’s attempts at disabling his wrist and leg away as easily as shaking feathers from his hide. Genji’s strikes carried no weight, but his melody of footwork flew him away from Hanzo’s curling stabs. His scarf trailed around him, passing autumn beneath the verdancy of his hair, but never catching in his elbows or choking him like Hanzo hoped. Genji never learned. The world never made him. It was Hanzo’s responsibility.

 

Genji thrust his sword and it sliced through the hair swaying around Hanzo’s face.

 

They both froze, following the silver peak of the blade over Hanzo’s ear. Genji swung the weapon out wide, shaking his head. His fingers started to loosen from the hilt. Hanzo lunged at him, and the swords clapped off one another. He retreated to his ready position, but Genji refused to hunt after him.

 

He loosed his katana from its defensive slant above his heart and spired it to Genji, the same kind of hair-trimming strike, but Hanzo affected a gentle turn in his wrist that would slit it through something vital. The move forced Genji onto the raised perimeter of the fighting pit, and Hanzo hacked sideways into the wall, corralling him toward the dead end of the room. The swords ground past each other in tortured violin. Genji backed up.

 

Hanzo’s first cut after him missed and raked through the dangling tail of their father’s calligraphy scroll. He dropped from the sky again before Genji could flit away.

 

Hanzo painted his own face red.

 

He tasted Genji settling on his tongue.

 

They stopped neatly as match point in sparring, gasping at different intervals.

 

Genji dropped his sword. Hanzo flinched at the clatter, red beads pearling from his eyelashes.

 

Pin-eyed, Genji felt across his splattered breastplate for the break. Hanzo’s carve was no thicker than the whisker of a cat, drooling tomato from its edge. Genji got in one good shove, slamming Hanzo on the wall, holding him down as an assist to clamber past. He limped for the exit like a child trying to carry a glass of wine.

 

Hanzo followed.

 

The red dragon’s tail rotted across the courtyard gravel. The front gates were closed. Hanzo caught up to Genji as he lay propped on the metal of the dragon bell, the whole structure trembling silently. His foot creaked on one of the steps up to the bellhouse, and Genji lurched at the balcony in the back. He slipped on his own mess.

 

“Genji,” Hanzo called. Genji stuck his elbow out for leverage, hauling his body toward the swathe of moonlight over the drop to the garden. Hanzo circled around and intercepted him face-on. Genji got a foot down and veered away.

 

Hanzo beat him back to the ground with the sword. Genji screamed under him, a wet, ballooning noise.

 

He retreated to catch his breath.

 

Genji sprang off the floor, an effervescent scarlet shadow spreading his wings as he flung himself at the balcony.

 

Hanzo snared his shoulder and lined the sword through him, nailing him to one of the posts supporting the roof.

 

Genji stopped shrieking after the first ten centimeters. His eyes bulged up gray and glossy, trailways of sticky salt pushed out onto his cheeks. Hanzo worked into him up to the hilt, pressing their bodies together. Genji’s damp uniform smeared on him, stinging his nose. His convulsions widened the opening Hanzo made. It was uncanny, how well he took after Sojiro, with his white skin and fluid falling from his mouth, even if he cut his hair ragged and lost its pure ebony color. Hanzo reared back in alarm when Genji’s hands came up at him, but they slapped and grabbed bonelessly, making a mess of his hair, leaving splotches of his brother on his mouth and back.

 

The child softened beneath him. Hanzo whispered encouragement in his ear as he unstuck the sword from the wood and stumbled away from the post with Genji impaled in his arms. He thought the body would be cold, a touch of winter even as the cherry buds inhaled around them. Moonlight.

 

But Genji nestled warm against his neck. Hanzo pushed his head away, startled when Genji followed through with the motion, straightening his face. His glass eyes did not move much, stuck on insignificant details of Hanzo like his nose and lips rather than meeting him glare for glare. Now that Genji was alert, Hanzo clawed the silken twists of his scarf from his neck, and the stained cloth dropped heavy from his hand to the floor.

 

Glimmers of emerald lit the dark to his left. He discovered Genji’s fingers wound just under his elbow, and a green dragon frothing out onto the buried lines of his tattoo. Shrunk to almost nothing, snarled tube bending apart, the dragon stuck to Hanzo’s armguard with his claws and managed a coil around him, brightening as he secured the embrace. Hanzo’s eyes grew wide, mostly white.

 

“How dare you!” He locked both hands back around the sword hilt and shoved Genji off the balcony.

 

_RYUU GA WAGA TEKI WO KURAU_

A pathetic enemy cleansed from the world, finding honor only in death.

 

He did not understand at first why, long after his hands released the sword, the dragon sprung from his heart remained with Genji. Clung to him, split in half to net his body properly. Contracted, clawed deeper, bit into his throat, winding tighter, until Genji burst. A few lumps of sewage fell away into the black of the garden. The two heads of the dragon arched toward the moon, opening his bloody mouths to the long purple void of the sky before fading.

 

Hanzo stood alone at the precipice, cut open by the white fingertips of the stars. His ears held nothing but a triangle’s rattling chord, muffled in the canals of his head.

 

He flipped his sleeve back from his armguard. Unspun the leather from his wrist and paced two fingers down the channel of veins and tendons where the dragon touched him. It was harder to see with his skin obscured by so many blue scales and fiery whips, but he found nothing. Genji had not left a single wound on him.

 

The sky churned quietly with distant cars. His hand clenched, seeking the resistance of a sword hilt long gone. Hanzo looked at the crater in the balcony post, and withdrew beneath the shadow of the roof. After a time, he sloughed around and returned to his castle.

 

He saw them as he walked: the coin-like sheens on the eyes of cats, the family’s guardians peeking out of crevices and doorways at him. The moonlight ceased to trouble him as he let the tower door swing closed. He climbed the stairs, where the phantom was only allowed in through the occasional orderly glass frame.

 

When he passed his father’s room, his father said, “A very old thing in a new world, isn’t it Hanzo?”

 

Hanzo stopped and watched the room through the doorway. It teetered gray and formless, curtains drawn across the huge bay windows. He advanced along the empty bench rows and switched on the lights of the master bedroom.

 

His father remained shrouded on the bed. Despite the mattress stuffed with dry ice, Sojiro had begun to smell, another autumn’s mulch intertwining with the wood of the floor and walls. A flickering bulb in one of the wall sconces tapped up and down the scene, seesawing the shadow of its reclined figure.

 

Hanzo went to his room, entered his bed, and went to sleep.

 

Professional footsteps entering the suite hallway roused him after the moon had gone out.

 

“Why is the door open?” a voice asked. The noise came closer, squeaked at the door, then tumbled back in a flapping of cloth and the rocking of tangled weights.

 

“Stop, stop, it’s him!” another voice scolded. “You want to die?!”

 

“Why is he there?” the first whispered.

 

“Who cares. Just leave it-- leave it outside for him.”

 

Something soft landed on Hanzo’s doorstep.

 

The voices departed.

 

He woke a second time to silence, the room still dark, but a full day overflowing around the bars on the windows. Brimming sunlight fractured the walls, crossing out pinups. His eye pulled to the framed calligraphy above the bedside table. It was not his handwriting. The orientation of objects in the room was not his. Crusted rose lines extended from the tips of his fingers down the side of the mattress, cracking as he got up. His clothing pressed black and wrinkled around his body. His foot grazed an ankle cuff as he slipped his legs from the bed.

 

Daylight scrabbled at the thin separation of the door from its frame. Hanzo did not remember walking over, but the cold brass handle bit his palm and he opened the door.

 

At his feet sat a white bag with stains along the bottom. He crouched and undid the drawstring.

 

Hanzo carried the bag outside. No guards watched the suite exit, but four of them lingered at the hallway corner. He let go with one hand to snap his fingers, but his hand smudged together rough and silent, and then he had to grab the lip of the bag again to keep it from sagging open.

 

“This is not enough,” he settled for rasping down the hall at them.

 

The men gawked at him without speaking. One of the four suddenly turned and ran down the tower steps. The rest twisted their necks to watch him go.

 

The eldest man lowered his chin, then led the approach to Hanzo. The other two were irritatingly young, teenagers in suits.

 

“Master,” the one shot through with salt and cellulite prompted as they stopped in front of him. Hanzo thrust the bag in their faces.

 

“Where is the rest of him?” he demanded. The men looked at each other. Hanzo scowled. “Where is Tadao?”

 

“He said he was leaving,” the same brave soul offered, struggling now to monotone his voice to report quality. “Going to America to be with his grandson.” Hanzo’s eyes glassed. He lost a piece of time, stirring again as one of the younger guards touched his shoulder.

 

“You are still…” He gestured at Hanzo’s clothing. “Shouldn’t you wash? Do you need help, Master? You must be--”

 

“ _Do not touch me_ ,” Hanzo hissed. The guard held up his empty hands. Hanzo lifted the bag again. “Who was in charge of this?”

 

The last member of the trio was an egg-faced boy who watched the proceedings with a slanted frown stretched across his face, tufts of red dye hanging in front of his ears. The rest of his black hair outlined his skull and trained a few oily strings down the back of his neck. A horn-rimmed visor bent magenta plastic over his eyes.

 

“Didn’t you eat the rest of him?” he drawled.

 

Hanzo’s hand caught the entire flat of his face, knifing around his visor and pulling it off, then smashing it back into his eyes. The woodwind of his scream bubbled high through the tower. Hanzo slammed him head-first into the wall.

 

“That’s enough, Hanzo.” Uncle’s gravelly throat percolated up the stairway. Both elder Shimada came around the corner and flurried toward him. Despite their expensive patterned clothes, they cradled his grimy neck and hair in their hands, seeping over the top of his head. “You have done your family a great service. Do not squander your judgement.” Hanzo released the boy. He fell on his knees, hands shaking around his face, whimpering at the feet of his Master properly.

 

Uncle framed his long, root-like fingers around the bag and took it away. “Please go to your room and clean up. Our guests are arriving soon.” Hanzo swallowed, trying to remember. “For the funerals?” Uncle offered. “I already informed them of the addition. Now hurry-- we are scheduled to receive the Yanai Clan first. This is when we must be at our most respectable.” He sniffed into the bag. “This is plenty for the rituals.”

 

“What did you tell her?” Hanzo heard his own voice spit out of his throat like a clot. Uncle raised his eyebrows.

 

“That drunken fools die sometimes.” He took Hanzo’s arm above his elbow and showed him how to walk the first few steps. His sharp bearded chin rose at the remaining guards. “Assist.”

 

“He said he did not want--” the younger one began, but Hanzo’s uncle pointed at the suspended body with his fiery eyes. The men closed, and Hanzo said nothing as they walked him to his door. His uncles flowed off to their business, and the only thing left in the hall was the boy crumpled over himself, crying on the floorboards.

 

* * *

 

A woman’s torso tore from her billowing kimono as she raked her dagger through a man’s back. A tiger crouched with a man’s head hanging from her serpentine fangs. An ogre in her hut beckoned a young man out of the rain with one hand, laying a hex on him with the other behind her back. Paper lanterns stood aflame on flowering poles, women’s faces roaring from the smoke. Sakura and tsubaki blossoms feathered shapely wings stuffed with thorns. Every line was red or black. Eyes bulged from screaming tooth-filled faces, gold dot pupils screwed in opposite directions. Embers beaded off a canvas of skin.

 

Sayuki’s wedding dress bared her entire back, even cut out her shoulders and upper arms, while it armored the rest of her head-to-toe in white. She watched him approach in her gilded mirror.

 

A beet-colored omnic in a cropped blouse and short skirt posed in a chair beside the window curtains. Holograms of irises wrapped a halo around its bald head, other flowers iridescing in semi-hidden clusters down the bare pipes of its stomach and legs. A clamshell of dark slots unshielded on its head when he entered, but the omnic otherwise remained still and silent, articulated crimson hands relaxed on its exposed brass kneecaps.

 

Hanzo’s reflection unfolded pale hands from the pockets of his storm gray suit jacket, showing the panel of his phone to Sayuki.

 

“You have not answered my texts,” he notified her in a soft voice, like the dry rubbing of leaves.

 

“Since yesterday?”

 

“Since the funeral.”

 

“Was that so long ago? You are such an impatient boy.” She twisted toward him, her skull veiled in opaque velvet with a thin visor of robin’s egg blue perched where her eyes should have been. “There is no purpose in speaking to a failed prospect who cannot keep his operation under control. Your presence here is inappropriate. In fact you should not even attend the ceremony.”

 

“Your father invited me.” Hanzo returned the phone to his pocket, tugged at Sojiro’s cufflinks in his sleeves.

 

“He is just rubbing your face in it. He does not know what you are.” Sayuki’s voice cracked. She elevated from her chair and clicked toward him, dress train gliding behind her. She pressed herself to him, hands flexing over the bow of his collarbones. Something hard between her breasts flattened to him. Her thin breaths tickled up his throat. Hanzo stared down into the blue lightning of her eyes.

 

“You could be mistaken,” he taunted her.

 

“Tell me.” Sayuki grasped the tails of his long black hair. “Your family was too fast to retrieve the urn.” She reserved something from the statement, and at his inquiring nod stripped her glove to show a platinum chain woven beneath her elbow. A single burnt fingerbone hung down her skin by that mechanical anchor. “It’s plastic,” she said. “Someone printed a bunch of these and threw them on the crematorium plate. The anatomy isn’t even human. If there is something you cannot do, Hanzo, tell me, and I can…even now…I can take him--”

 

“You never were a ceremonial girl,” Hanzo sniffed. The last of his teasing amusement fell from his lips, and his glare edified. “Maybe he ran away, like you told him to.” Sayuki flinched, sleeve limping back down her fallen arm. He thumbed one of the white roses ringing her headpiece, drawing blood on what he thought would only be digital representations. He rubbed it off within her corolla of petals. The flowers trembled atop her head.

 

“Your oldest men are all frightened,” she spoke in a different voice. “What are they so frightened of? Why did you have to hire so many new ones?”

 

“Which of them is it?” Hanzo responded, and Sayuki’s veil swayed blank white around her face. “Which one of my men actually belongs to you?” His mouth pursed in a bitter simper. “The American? That would be your style.”

 

Sayuki curled her hands to her chest, one still in its glove and one bare. She slipped beneath the snowy folds, and he felt her draw the rigid gift out from between their hearts. A knife, sixteen centimeters, with a porcelain case and hilt wrapped in cotton bandages. Sayuki dropped the case on the floor, so that nothing remained between Hanzo and the keen metal. “So inelegant,” he chided.

 

Then he turned his face aside, watching the window curtains and ignoring the statue of the omnic on his peripheral. He searched for the little piece of blue sky chiming through the curtain part. His neck gleamed with color, daylight filtered by champagne silk and gliding across his body. Sayuki’s visor glittered over the top of the knife at him.

 

When she did not act, Hanzo regarded her sheathed face. “Are you afraid of getting a mess on your costume?” he accused her. Sayuki stepped backward, separating from him like writing from paper.

 

She turned the knife handle out to him.

 

“You should do it yourself.”

 

Hanzo’s mouth opened in hideous, silent betrayal. He smoothed himself from top to bottom. Sayuki waited.

 

“Your wedding…” he started.

 

“None of this is important,” she declared. “Are you a coward, too?” Hanzo found himself glancing at the omnic. “Don’t look at him,” Sayuki ordered, and Hanzo reviewed the omnic’s skirt and blouse again, forehead wrinkling, before he obeyed.

 

He stared past the knife, at Sayuki’s outlandish dressings. He scowled at the steady blue haunt of her visor.

 

“I will not submit to your amusements,” he grunted.

 

“Do you need help, Hanzo?” She bent to the ground to collect the knife sheath, and slid everything back together, repairing the jigsaw of the moment. “I will send you help,” she promised. Hanzo sighed. He headed to the door.

 

Sayuki collapsed on the floor behind him, and he heard the wooden bump of a chair leg. Looking back from the doorway, he watched the omnic smother her, pressing its panel face against hers through the cloth, then metal to skin as she loosened her veil. He followed the drips of water and mascara to the floor beneath her bowed face.

 

“You should do whatever helps you forget the Shimada Clan ever existed,” he advised. Sayuki and her omnic threaded hands. “It would be better if we all forgot.”

 

He returned to the foyer, where he walked past one of the guards spread across the venue in search of him.

 

“Whoa boss, make sure you let someone know next time you feel kin to wandering!” the man exclaimed, all bright and grinning. Hanzo ignored him and sat in his assigned pew. When it was time, Sayuki passed by without looking at him. She ignored an entire half of her audience to keep from looking.

 

Hanzo realized there was no further benefit to staying, so he stood up during the monk’s pulpit rambling and left.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter:** It's hard to say who Father would be more disappointed by.
>   * Yes, we are getting back to the present next chapter.
>   * Present-day Japanese universities can actually be very lax about attendance, which may be strange to reconcile if you have ever heard about juku/"cram school" for students doing their secondary education (there's actually cram schools for kindergartners in Japan now too), or the markedly low absenteeism rates at Japanese secondary schools. The issue is that in the third/fourth year of university, many students will begin looking for a job. The university's only means to graduate those students, who have no time to take classes, is to say that the only requirement for graduating certain classes is to write a report. There's a lot more written about the various aspects of the school system in Japan but I'll leave it at that, because the assumption in Overwatch is that many of the issues in various societal systems have potentially changed or been improved. Revamps of the education system in Japan have been and are a hot topic of discussion.
>   * _Kamagasaki_ \- a district in Osaka with a large population of homeless day labororers. The name "Kamagasaki" does not appear on official documents, and city officials rather infamously pulled a film from an Osaka film festival in 2014 after the director refused to remove content identifying Kamagasaki by name.
>   * _umeboshi_ \- pickled ume fruits, considered a home remedy for hangovers. Though umes are frequently called "plums", they are a closer relative to the apricot. 
>   * In the early beta version of Overwatch, the Hanamura map had a large painting of two warriors standing in front of a dragon in the sky on Point B. When the Dragons animated short released, that painting was exchanged for the painting of the two dragons, and the battle damage from the short was added to the map. This is one the earliest examples of Blizzard editing maps to reflect their animated shorts or lore events. The painting of the two warriors ended up being reused at Genji's home in Nepal.
>   * Tigers have an interesting cultural place in Japan. No tigers have ever lived in the country (by their own will, anyway), but thanks to cultural exchange they have been showing up in Japanese stories and artwork for centuries. Tigers were often painted according to second-hand accounts, so they would end up with distinctly non-tigerish characteristics. Matsui Keichu's [Tiger Cleaning Its Paw](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Tiger_Cleaning_its_Paw%27_by_Matsui_Keichu_\(1785-1819\),_early_19th_century.jpg) scroll, for example, shows a tiger with slit eyes and a body modeled after a housecat. Certain other tiger-related cultural notes transmitted from China, such as Byakko (Baihu) the White Tiger of the West, the tiger of the zodiac, and the association of the tiger and the dragon with the Chinese Taoist concepts of Yin and Yang. The tiger and the dragon are considered both eternal rivals and eternally balanced, unable to defeat one another.
>   * _Tsubaki_ \- a Japanese flower from the _Camellia_ (tea flower) genus, also called the "rose of Winter"
>   * Japan has a few different wedding fashions and ceremonies, but the most popular wedding dress in the modern day is a Christian/Western-style gown
>   * Happy space hamsters to all!
> 



	25. Assassin

 

The Master of the Shimada knelt upon the ground.

 

His bloodline shriveled around him until it formed dust on the walls. His brother, the only soul in the world who could see him, splattered across the hanging scroll in unreadable lines. The name _Shimada_ still existed, but his family had gone. Some he dropped into the ashes himself.

 

As a joke, the Master remained alive. His body grayed as it struggled to break free of him. He returned here every year, the silence in the digital firelight worth almost as much as the opportunity for defeat.

 

He placed an empty cup beside his knees. A corpse could not drink, but he could take offense. He might think the Master was calling him a child.

 

Next he anchored his stolen pedestal directly ahead. Chipped dragons wound together on its base. He reserved the unlit incense rods matching the holes in the pedestal top, the dark battery of pins slicking his nose with pine and elm.

 

As he touched the incense aflame, he kept his eyes on the barred feather of the sparrow-hawk at his right side. The match fire soared and smoked out, and he shut himself away in the maze of the burning garden. Charring herbs swallowed his lungs. He imagined bitterly that he only made the ritual to snuff out the lightning of his senses, the endless electricity trying to describe this world to him like it was something new.

 

The Assassin crawling across the shrine towards him stirred not an ounce of moonlight, flapped through the night poking in the open windows without a sound, yet he knew it was there. It did not occur to him to wonder why that was until much later. His eyes lifted with the tired, unbreakable weight of ancient doors.

 

The incense quieted as he settled it on the pedestal. The current of his surroundings grated back across his windpipe. Even as he framed his hearty scowl, he entertained the notion that he might speak and no one would answer, and the rushes of silver at his temples would finally prove themselves.

 

The whisper of the Assassin’s mechanical parts landed behind him, cupping a reassurance at his shoulder.

 

“You are bold to come to Shimada Castle,” it told him from a speaker in its hollow throat. “The den of your enemies.”

 

Yes, the Master’s family had always been his enemies. The situation was irreparable. In fits of rage, the worming babies that remained still tried to shortcut the ending by submitting their flimsy killers to him.

 

His first thought was that this was not one of theirs.

 

He had discovered the Shimadas’ new willingness to hire omnics outside, but the clan’s remnants were not in good standing with units of sufficient caliber to challenge him. All such omnics belonged to a woman in Tokyo. A year ago, or maybe it was two years now, he imagined she had given up after sacrificing so many of her friends on his altar.

 

But here stood the evidence otherwise. It had…strange qualities, for a machine. It clothed its skeleton in facsimile of the human figure. He was reminded unpleasantly of Numbani, of chassis growing prosthetic breasts, supple iron branches vibrating out wigs of streaking starlight. But he had never seen Vitruvian-style muscle applique, overflowing here from beneath tacked armor plates. Like the mimics of Numbani, the Assassin was imperfect, vents marbling its torso in a parade of dry sword cuts. It had no face, only its static, eternal mask. A deep voice-- but it played with him, hiding that quality.

 

He only noticed the bass when the Assassin simulated anger. “You risk so much to honor someone you murdered!” it spat at him, along with a test of throwing stars. The only possible value in its taunting was to wedge his guard and provide it with an opening. He would bite out its voice box for the insult.

 

“You know nothing of what happened!” Bickering with the Assassin came easy.

 

Landing his shots proved impossible.

 

It ebbed away from him, sinuous and reflective, its voice slithering in his head.

 

Freeing itself from gravity, it arched poetic onto the shrine’s central platform, then sprang to the balcony outside to tempt him from the orange comfort of the lamps. It would have him walk on his own two feet to his death. The Master obliged.

 

Midnight winds rolled cool against his legs as he searched for the ghost. He sacrificed another arrow to the beckoning of its voice. It revealed its body to meet the last of his defenses head-on.

 

It cut the arrow the Master let fly in half.

 

His quiver stood empty. The Assassin froze in front of him like run-out clockwork. He did not carry a sword to mirror its weapon of choice.

 

The bow would serve. He charged his assailant, and it pricked from its bent-legged stance, tensing like a man. As he circled blue swipes of the storm at its body, it turned solid, deflecting his blows. It retreated without attacking.

 

Hunching to a distantly familiar readying curl, it feinted against his bow with its sword, forcing him to level the weapon as his only shield.

 

Gearing spun through the Assassin’s segmented shell and it twisted off the ground, kicking through his unprotected shoulder and slamming him into the balcony banister.

 

It nearly broke his ribs when it landed on him, crunching the railing beneath their combined weight and opening a path to the weedy garden below. Its blade-tip rooted at his throat. The cherries from the village breezed past. Master and Assassin were evenly matched. It could have been him beneath those plastic scales.

 

The Assassin’s arms shook as he resisted its fatal pressure. All it could manage was to teeter atop him. The impish tang left its voice. It lectured him. Decried his incense as it sought his artery. There was an arrow stuck in the balcony wood to the left behind it.

 

_Genji,_ the Assassin hissed from within its sack of pedagogy.

 

“You are not worthy to say his name!” Hanzo roared back, wrenching its bone white frame off-balance. The navy curve of his bow yoked the Assassin’s neck, and its hands scrambled upward as though it could asphyxiate. An overheated spine wisped across his chest as he showed it how to fly.

 

He grabbed the arrow as the Assassin crashed artlessly on its head. It limped to its feet, dead-on in front of him. Its umbilical of graceful hauntings tore apart, leaving it wingless on the ground. At this proximity even its naked coat of muscle could not hide its absence of humanity. He reveled in its stunned silence as he posed the bow.

 

_RYUU GA WAGA TEKI WO KURAU_

The blue dragon erupted from his hands, churning both halves around the vessel arrow, bursting free to consume his enemy.

 

The Assassin drew the long katana retained on its back the entire fight, and answered him.

 

_RYUUJIN NO KEN WO KURAE_

A green dragon fanned around its body.

 

He appeared like he did in Hanzo’s dreams: older, hardened by his years, collected back together from the hundreds of pin lights fading over gnarled garden trees. Lion’s jaws opened from the apex of the legless eel’s spine. Flushes of lightning coated his body in glowing scales. The new dragon donned his matching crown of horn and membrane. A neon swipe of the Assassin’s sword detached him from its chest and arm, and green swam out to crash into blue.

 

But they met in the air, where they were free of all constraints. The green dragon slid between the pieces of him, and they united across the rapids. Hanzo shut his mouth, lips peeling ineffectively down the swells of his fangs. He could smell the river even in this cursed house.

 

There was a moment where the water flowed pure and cool around him.

 

A feather of iodine dripped across his nostrils.

 

The green dragon wound warm around his heart.

 

Hanzo scrambled to the surface. A distant ocean encroached on their luminescent bond. It stained the deltas and sword glass beaches with old salt. None of the river’s drowned geography was familiar. He was not what Hanzo remembered. _Not him._

 

The Assassin was moving, twisting in place. The diamond point of its sword lay a path over the balcony for the two dragons. They coiled around its body lovingly.

 

Hanzo had been tricked. The copper tide of the sea lashed across his dry skin. His own dragon spiraled toward him salty and wild, teeth pearling out of his widening maw. The unruly comet’s roar pounded through his blood as he put up his arms. Swords of lightning and thunder hurtled into his flesh and his eyes.

 

The blue dragon pulsed out into the night.

 

Hanzo collapsed to his knees. His body hung faintly upon the air, a stain upon this world. His breath returned to him in rocking cradle twinges, eyelids struggling against the weight of the night. Blue rivers of vein and nerve whipped fire down his dragging wrists. Under his skin the expectation remained: that his lightning would be stripped from him, and stretched between the stars until he broke.

 

The green dragon coiled back into his white-armored scabbard.

 

Wind poured out of the lavender evening sky, sewing the holes in Hanzo’s lungs. He managed words:

 

“Who are you?”

 

The Assassin’s shoulders primed, head daggering low like a beast. It snapped at Hanzo, the candle line of its sword resting to his throat. Hanzo’s hands spasmed against the air, surprised into a brief defense.

 

That impulse faded.

 

It did not matter who the killer was. It did not matter what story it would write after he decayed across the ancient floors. A blade of full of promises was lifting his face in defeat. “Do it then,” the Master of the Shimada ordered his Assassin. “Kill me.”

 

The Assassin’s possessed green light tilted towards him.

 

“No.” It stood tall and sheathed its blade. “I will not give you the death you wish for.”

 

The Assassin removed its mask. Underneath its face was withered and burnt.

 

He had Genji’s eyes.

 

“I have forgiven you,” Genji said.

 

Alone, the Master returned to his brother’s shrine. He got on his knees, though that sent a bruised pang up his legs. He lifted the incense from the pedestal and finished his prayers, like he was supposed to. Only occasionally did a tremor waver the smoke in his hand.

 

He opened his eyes and searched his fist clenched white around the incense. The next step was to gather his things and vanish like he had never been there in the first place. Hanzo contracted his fingers into an ungainly vice, snapped the incense, and it extinguished as it hit the floor. He looped his quiver off his back and rested it in his lap.

 

In time, he took the hawk feather from the floor, and laid it in a seamed pouch lining the quiver. The other objects he left behind.

 

He traced years-old steps from the shrine to the bellhouse. Every wooden corner and post dribbled and seeped around him. The rocks were stained by warped swathes of frothing, glimmering fluid. He rested his hand on the bell as the guards groaned around his feet, and watched the universe turn above the infinite drop to the garden.

 

An anomaly stood out in the courtyard as he left: the Shimada guard omnic was missing. The indent of its destroyed body printed the gravel, and beside its fallen shadow were two slender footsteps. The one who stole the corpse flew down to it and away again, never to stay with the earth for long.

 

_A demon._

 


	26. Two Dragons

 

Soft, without callouses, fingers scratched round drumbeats down his arm.

 

The bartender traced the head of the dragon on his wrist, failing to notice his eye opening and fixing on her. His muscles were dead, his bones chains to the bartop. The tendons in the back of his knuckles swallowed and she withdrew her hand, securing herself on the knit of her purse. By daylight she wore a jacket over her strapless top. His fingers cracked apart, and he trailed himself upright, staring at her with hooded, stained eyes.

 

She offered to take him to breakfast with her at the diner in Aoyama. Go to her home afterwards, for a shower. He wanted to ask if she had been something else before the blackout that destroyed that town.

 

“Never touch me again, filth,” Hanzo rasped at her.

 

He reached for his bow, jolting awake when he realized it was no longer beside his barstool. The bartender stepped behind the counter and ducked under the mounted purple logo lights, retrieving his weapons from her cache there. She held them out, face blank. He laid the weight of his belongings across his back and palmed the gourd flagon on his belt, ensuring it was full before he slipped out of the building.

 

The blue sky scorched his eyes. A mural of neon tubing depicting a topless armored woman riding a horse clicked gray beside him. Only the bartender’s vehicle remained in the lot, its red hull ramping a disc over the concrete. Beyond its bloody crest lay the highway back to the village center. Once he could bear it, he palmed a phone out into the glare. He typed with his thumb as he approached the borderline.

 

Three figures blurred in the sunlight on the road ahead of him. Hanzo’s split ribbon flickered off his spine, catching the wind. His thumb chucked across the _SEND_ key, then slid away as he raised his head.

 

The Shimada guard’s mechanical corpse, jacketless, the half-coins of its horns shining in golden crescents, bespoke the pale demon beside it. The demon laughed and clapped his arm over the omnic’s shoulders. Nearing banks of cherry blossoms dewed necrotic pink tones around their skeletal frames. All signs of the arrow Hanzo had shot through the guard’s chest were gone.

 

Off to one side, closer to the grass, an ordinary omnic model floated after the others, like a store clerk tired of using its feet.

 

The trio of machines continued on to Hanamura.

 

Hanzo followed.

 

In time he became used to walking in the crush of daylight. The village ahead of him filled with narrowly spaced stacks of wooden buildings and warped crowns of pine that offered sanctuary. His targets arrived at a budget apartment rack, and Hanzo scaled its twin on the other side of the turtleshell tile street. Leftover festival fish roasts sprinkled out of the apartment vents, and a familiar muffle of avocado rice swaddled his throat as he approached the street side of the roof. Koinobori flags swam in the sun, split tails hilling and falling around him on the roof edge.

 

The Shimada guard walked ahead of the others, crossing a gated yard lined by green tomato plants. It brushed its hand across a keycard panel to open the numbered door, and bowed deeply to its guests. They followed it inside. Blinds cloaked the lone window.

 

Movement disrupted the beige camphorwood built beneath his perch. Doors indexed out of the wall. Other guards flushed from their rooms, some still in robes. Lit phone screens dangled from their hands as they dashed across the street and through the omnic’s unlocked gate. As more of them gathered, the door beyond the tomato plants opened less easily, and a couple men elected to stay outside, smoking their electronic cigarettes.

 

Hanzo spent the hour counting his arrows. One had gone for good. It belonged in that omnic’s oily heart.

 

The apartment door opened wide. Genji stood within its angular iris, framing a deeper composition of shirtless men around a table, glaring at each other over their ivory playing cards. Kisses of sake drifted out into the street. Someone else’s green tie wrapped the bulky crest of Genji’s helmet. The floating omnic and the horned guard joined him in the shade of the doorframe.

 

“Perhaps you should consider less eventful employment,” Genji advised as he took a cigarette offered to him by one of the men pouting in the yard. He turned the lifelike white roll from side-to-side with his glossy hands. “But I suppose that is no fun.” He mushed the cigarette ineffectively against his smooth faceplate, and handed it back to a chorus of laughter.

 

“I hope to meet you again, brother,” the plain omnic sitting between all of them told the guard. The guard bowed rapidly, arms steepling over its head in agreement.

 

The leftover omnic separated from the throng of guards and traveled on with Genji. They walked side-by-side.

 

Hanzo followed.

 

Fabric cherry blossoms strung around the door of a tourist shop like a beard. The real thing trailed after Genji’s footsteps inside. Songbirds scratched the air from low bonsai at the street-edge. Hanzo watched Genji stride in pieces behind panes of glass. He bent over to rifle through a selection of obnoxious card envelopes, choosing one scalded with glitter and holding it above his motionless face. He exchanged it for one dyed by hot pink garden patterns.

 

Genji took the envelope to the register, where the omnic with him paid for it. Genji tucked the purchase into a beaded bag he wore at his hip. The colorful honeycomb strap flashed at his chest as he led the omnic around the flea market court.

 

They reached a storage facility with a fence of scraped chrome, and dead pines thorning the perimeter. It had been there when Hanzo ruled this place too. Genji popped out from the cathedral of iron cubes with an enormous board hefted over his head. After puzzle piecing himself through the security gate, he turned his visor up at the white plastic wrapper hiding the board’s contents. The package was so large he could only balance it on his fingertips.

 

For the first time, Hanzo saw it.

 

Many arms curled toward Genji. No articulation, no joints, no bones-- just purple chains gathering at his brother’s spine. Genji swiveled at the touch, canting his head at the haze blossoming around him.

 

He saw it too.

 

The fluid appendages came from the omnic. Several of its ordinary turquoise lights winked, and Genji hefted his luggage into its nest of discordant limbs. The board floated behind it as a dismembered chunk of a throne. The omnic detached from the cracks in Genji’s armor, and flapped tentacles around the corners of its parcel.

 

“Is it heavy, Master?” Genji asked, and one of the ropey boluses balled at its tip, poking up a tattered flange in imitation of a thumb. The lights jammed through Genji’s body puffed springy green, and the phantasm behind the omnic faded. The board continued to float on a current Hanzo could not see, like the etched talismans around the omnic’s neck. It spoke:

 

“Though Athena informs me she will send a drone to pick it up for us.”

 

The omnic was covered in slashes and pits that only showed when it turned in the sun after Genji. Hanzo got lost in the cloth dipping from its fleshless waist. The pattern recalled the monks of the Shambali, myths from the news feeds. Their leader had never made the joke of hovering its false iconism straight across the earth.

 

Genji’s head creaked toward his hiding place.

 

Hanzo went still, did not even breathe. His position was measured within the triangle of shadow from a jutting chimney. Genji would be fighting the boiling dress of the sun to see anything. The demon’s glance was a thoughtful scuff against heaven, nothing more. As expected, his plastic visor lowered blindly, and he curled a finger upon the point of his chin, back to his acting irreverence.

 

“I hope we are not using too much of Winston’s resources again!” he cheeped to the monk, the metal echo that normally muffled his voice scarce.

 

“Athena does not mind. She says she enjoys flying her smaller shells.”

 

The sky saturated around Hanzo, pressing the shadow in which he lived even with the surrounding light. He did not have to move after the wanderers for a long time. They traveled in a straight line from the market. Genji peeked at shop windows, but none tempted him inside. The monk was very still aside from its steady forward drift.

 

Something tugged them away at last, their bodies schooling together into a forest of towering conch shells inlaid with slides and grips for small hands.

 

Hanzo took time to lift his knees from the rooftop, but he followed.

 

A boy had fallen from climbing bars held by static plasmetal crabs and smashed his back on the pallet of blue foam underneath. The demon and monk abandoned their possessions carelessly on a bench, and joined the other children gathered around the boy, creating a kaleidoscopic singularity of shiny plates and bright fabric.

 

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” the fallen boy screamed. The monk shook his head at Genji.

 

“You can,” Genji’s synthesizer rattled deeply, startling the red-faced child. “If you had no breath, you could not speak. Listen.” He flattened his hand on the monk’s back, coaxing a gasp from its corded throat. “Even Zenyatta breathes, in his way,” Genji laughed. The angry blood thinned beneath the boy’s cheeks, exchanged for colorless bewilderment. Genji flipped his hand forward. The boy evaluated the gears and rubbery paneling, then pressed his small, chubby palm in Genji’s grip. “Try to do it in time with me,” Genji said, rolling his other hand at his chest. His torso rose, smooth and rhythmic. “Breathe,” he encouraged, and the boy imitated him.

 

A door slammed open on the top level of the adjacent apartments and a father in a surgical mask ran down three flights of stairs, undone tie flapping against his white button-down. Genji helped the boy stand. The monk beside him tracked the new arrival’s approach.

 

“Eh?!” the man croaked at the gathering through his robin’s egg cloth, fumbling for a device in his pocket. The boy in Genji’s arms looked up, pink-cheeked.

 

“I fell, Dad.”

 

The man’s hand stilled in his pocket, and he squatted on the foam mulch in his dress shoes. He shooed Genji off and grabbed his child from the ground, flattening the boy’s hair into a thicket as he scoured for injury. The other kids giggled, and the boy went red-faced for a new reason, pushing at his father’s embrace.

 

Clouds softened the sun, dappling the playground with their buttery canopies. Genji and his monk retreated from the scene, walking between plastic gulls with children climbing their backs or resting atop their long wings. Genji took the monk by the wrist and pulled it beneath yellowing trees. He placed it in a swing, twisting its hips down to make sure it was actually touching the strap, and went around behind to push.

 

The monk felt the heavy chains holding the swing in place, looking high to the curdled clouds. Genji attacked its back, and it swept through the air with a chirp of its gears. The swingset rested in the domain of an old tree, and even the greatest arc of the chains sent only the toe of the monk’s sandal into the sun. Genji maintained the nonsense for a couple minutes. His head piloted in different cardinals behind the giddy monk, searching for something.

 

His conditioned rhythm, written up his mechanical arms, cracked into a tremble. Hanzo blinked. Genji’s fingers blurred into the green tie noosed around his headguard. He pushed the monk once more with a single arm, then withdrew to the bench under the tree trunk. The monk peered at him from between the chains. Genji waved the attention off as he leaned into the wooden bench back.

 

The monk relaxed its weight into the swing as it stilled over the foam. It gazed into the sky again, past the spirals of gold-dusted leaves.

 

The world began to rain.

 

Hanzo blinked cold water from his eyes as he watched the monk travel to Genji and guide him up from his collapse on the bench. Genji rested his wrists on his legs. The monk placed its own hand over him. Hanzo could barely hear them through the growing wash. They had no lips to read.

 

“--are here, with--” the monk said, and Genji shoved his free hand against the ashen bars around him, grabbing them and nodding. He leaned forward, the beveled bridge of his faceplate obscured by the omnic as he whispered something. The monk undressed the green tie from his head. Genji motioned across the park, and the monk went to retrieve their things.

 

By himself, Genji sagged. Only the lime arrow of his eyes switched around him, marking a few of the rooftops. He relaxed his vigilance as the monk returned. The monk handed him his bag, and they withdrew to an alleyway.

 

An orange and white drone with an Overwatch stencil on its tail pocked out of the clouds, falling in a meteor through the rain. The children scattering off the playground pointed and shouted at it. The drone slowed mid-way to the ground, nose orienting on the noise. With a surprised jerk, it deactivated its visible jets and glided out of sight into the alley.

 

After the drone faded back up through the rain with the white package suspended on its clasping arms, Hanzo crawled until he could look down the alley’s face from above.

 

Genji and the monk sat across from each other, each back cooling upon a different face of wet brick. Their bodies conformed to tight meditational diagrams, mummified in the water like sokushinbutsu, only the occasional spark of LEDs exchanged between their bowed heads.

 

 

In time, Hanzo too accepted the rain. Unlike the machines, he shivered on the rooftop.

 

Early evening saw the sun gulped down by the clouds. Footsteps drifted from the alleyway, striking puddles on the path. Hanzo opened his eyes. Every motion shedding water from his flesh, he looked to the bow resting by his side. He calculated Genji’s position below from his soaked steps. Black eyebrows pinned together. He returned the weapon to his back.

 

He followed his brother.

 

Genji led his monk under the grin of a green mascot and into the light of the ramen shop on the corner. This was what he did even though the gates of Shimada Castle beckoned from only a breath away. The dragons ate each other only a breath away.

 

Hanzo heard nothing human inside Rikimaru.

 

“May I ask, have you ever tried what you serve here before?” Genji teased.

 

“No,” another synthesizer replied shyly. “I am an omnic, sir.” A beat later, the quivering voice pitched upwards, “What are you?”

 

The demon’s laughter stretched into his voice.

 

“Genji.”

 

Hanzo came as close as the rippling square of firelight from the shop’s doorway, his presence obscured by the fog of growling rain, head cut off by the shadows of the noren as he dripped on the sidewalk. “Here,” Genji cooed, a meter away. “Give me your hand.”

 

“I am not authorized to serve my hand to customers. Only ramen,” the omnic worker informed him.

 

“Let me hold your hand for a time,” Genji clarified, this time without a hint of devilish mirth. “I would like to share some data with you.”

 

“I am not authorized to exchange data while on-duty,” the omnic droned again.

 

“What time does your shift end?” Genji flirted with it.

 

A game. A disgusting joke between human-shamming machines. Hanzo turned away into the roiling dark. His phone lit his face in a ghostly flash as he pulled up the message he meant to send earlier. He tapped it on its way now.

 

_READY._

 

* * *

 

“I work around the clock, sir,” the ramen server said.

 

Rain brushed beneath the noren and coiled at his ankles. Moonlight abandoned the sidewalk outside the empty door. Storm pressure drew steam from the noodle baths and soup pots out into the vacant street. The wind entered, soaked and cold, to finger the ragged lines of his cheeks.

 

Genji lowered his eyes from the hole in the side of the shop. He studied his own hands. One crumbled atop his reddish thigh. The other nested at the porcelain of a barely eaten ramen bowl, overflowing discs of squash and musty leaves shadowing the metal bars of his fingers. Broken eyebrow tufts contracted, he reached, and he squeezed the doll fasteners of his ringfinger.

 

A palm made from the same lifeless material spotlighted onto his back. He sat tall, smiling at his teacher.

 

“He is not ready for time to flow forward again,” he admitted, eyes warm on Zenyatta aside from tight, dry corners. There was a pallid trace to his cheeks the ramen had not mended.

 

“Time is an illusion,” Zen reminded him. “We each find it differently.”

 

“You have said that before.” Genji played with his plastic chopsticks, picking up a familiar squash rind with a pink star-like splash inside its melon yellow border. The cheap body of his utensil tripped texture sensors across his two-tone fingers. “Is it some treatise you never got me to read?” Or another desperate imitation, of a dogmatic elder brother.

 

“If we embrace time, we are able to describe our lives as a series of moments, placed in order one after another.” Zenyatta made a sheaf of his hand above the bar, and tapped his fingers down the rungs of an imaginary ladder beside Genji’s bowl. As he twisted his hand over in the bubbling air, Genji reflexively followed the circles carved into his palm. “But our experience may not fit this mold we set.”

 

Genji nodded, sticking the rind in his mouth as he watched Zenyatta’s hand dance through the amber light of Rikimaru. “Pain returns to us many times, though the cause was only beside us once,” Zenyatta said, and clawed at the crosshatch ceiling lamps. “We lie awake, going again to moments long realized, hoping vainly and selfishly that we can alter the cloth of our lives.”

 

“Is this supposed to be comforting?” Genji’s chopsticks stilled on the rim of his bowl. Zenyatta covered the shouldercap of his armor with that warm hand and leaned in like a drunk with a secret.

 

“And conversely, a single joy can last our lifetime,” he said. “We find new beauty in the same moment as we learn more about the world, and about ourselves.”

 

Genji tugged the squash rind from his lips, a single pathetic bite carved from its flank. He looked at Zenyatta through the hazy white heat boiling off the cooktops. There was a new chip of decay on the corner of Zenyatta’s mouthseam, solidifying the impression of his immaculate smile.

 

“I still have a lot of work to do to reach you, Master,” Genji vowed. He tried another bite of the rind, let it marinate atop his tongue. His eyes dulled. “Or maybe it varies from moment to moment.”

 

The server returned to polish the countertop. She filleted her cloth carefully around his resting hands. A few clicks resounded up the column of her neck as she scanned his abandoned bowl. Ducking under the bar, she reappeared with a jar of seaweed flakes and sesame seeds, and held it prospectively over his ramen. Genji shook his head, hunching his shoulders. The server put the jar away and resumed her sticky, repetitive maintenance cycle. Genji drew his elbow onto the counter and leaned over it, eyes to the side, watching the door.

 

A human form disturbed the soggy noren. The server gathered a red cup of sharp pork and noodles off the heater.

 

“Welcome!” she called. “Would you care to sample?”

 

The guest was a drunken leftover from Golden Week. He smelled like soaked grass, and his jeans blotched with hay stains. His pink MEKA t-shirt matched the rosy exertion in his serving plate face. He claimed the stool right next to Genji’s and waved off the sample, grinning as the server struggled to relieve a payment keycard from his hammy fist.

 

Genji wondered if he had ridden the train a long way. If he owned any cats.

 

The guest finally opened his hand. A samurai figurine made of clay lay beside his keycard. Its belly was cracked through and glued together again.

 

“A gift!” he declared. The server cradled the figurine, which uplifted a katana in each hand like the praying spikes of a mantis.

 

“You made this for your son,” she murmured, metal fingers folding around the hard clay.

 

“Ah!” the guest agreed in a wordless snort. “See what he did to it! It is yours now, my Momo!” She could barely keep the figurine from crumbling apart on her silver palms.

 

“Thank you.” She set it aside in an empty divot on her spice rack and began preparing a ramen bowl, though the guest had not specified his order.

 

“May you have many healthy sons…” he chortled. Only as his throat rumbled off did he suddenly lurch acknowledgement at the cyborg beside him. His lips hung as he considered the thick sword hilt protruding over Genji’s back, and Genji’s shattered skin.

 

He broke into a grin. “You are from say…Akihabara, right?” Genji opened his mouth, but the man burst over him. “Welcome, welcome! I hope the trees are treating you well! Sorry about the rain. But it is good for the flowers, you know! Gets them started early! Are there any flowers where you are from...?” His words slurred. The server brought his bowl, and he plugged his throat with ramen.

 

Genji spoke in the available quiet:

 

“There was a time when this was my favorite week of the year. I loved to come here and meet all the people coming from out of town.” The other guest tipped his bowl to his smiling lips, trying to suspend it from one hand so he could gesture at himself with the other. And he tried nodding while he gulped too. The broth spilled.

 

“It gets old?” he suggested as he motioned to the server for a new bowl. Genji looked over his own cold ramen.

 

“I could get used to enjoying it again.”

 

Shortly after midnight, the server gently shook the drunk awake.

 

“Sir, I am closing now. I have to begin preparing tomorrow’s ingredients.”

 

The man blinked his eyes out of sync, and chuckled at her.

 

“Ahhhh…but you know Momo, your shop is much warmer than my bed at home is going to be! Wonderful as always! Write the company director!”

 

“I have recorded your audio comment for delivery to my superiors. If you would also give verbal permission--” she began, but the guest waved himself out the door. Her head tracked after him, and reset to a forward position once he was gone. She turned to Genji, and shuffled over another pace to address him. “Sir, I am closing now.”

 

“Can I order one more time?” Genji stretched from his hours-long slouch against the counter. Zenyatta glanced at him. “I guess I am hungry again.”

 

“I have to begin preparing tomorrow’s ingredients, so I am closing now,” the server repeated. She removed the hachimaki rope from her head and placed it on the spice rack beside her samurai. Budging past the heaters to her small sink, she washed her hands. “But your request seems to be within an acceptable time limit.” She turned around and investigated her produce bins. “Would you like the same kind again?”

 

“With the vegetable broth, please.” Genji trailed his fingers across the cold, wilted bowl in front of him. “You will only need the amount for a sample cup.”

 

“I still have to charge full price. I can put the rest in takeaway, and you can enjoy it at home for up to three days. Please do not try to eat it on the train.”

 

“Maybe there will be someone who wants it,” Genji allowed.

 

“That is the spirit!” the server squeaked in English, attempting to quote some movie or advertising campaign he had never heard. Genji pocketed his cheeks on his palms as he watched her work.

 

“Is your name really Momo or was he just being rude?” he asked.

 

“That is name he gave me,” Momo answered without looking up from a knot of steaming spinach she was fluffing with her tongs. “He is one of my regulars. I like seeing him. He is like the children-- always so happy!” Genji blinked and referenced Zenyatta, who only watched in silence as the server shook boiling water off her fingers.

 

Momo walked outside while the recipe bubbled, and used a forked stick to flip the sign above the noren from _OPEN_ to _CLOSED._ She vibrated her frame dry as she returned over the front step, and touched a hand to the soaked dapples of her vest, surprised.

 

“How old are you, Miss Momo?” Genji probed.

 

“I am two years old approximated, sir.”

 

“You must be very dependable to run your own shop at two,” Zenyatta interceded with a gentle knell of his voice.

 

“Thank you!” Momo served Genji a sample cup stuffed with leaves and a handful of noodles. She handed him a fresh chopstick packet. “Enjoy!”

 

“Then there are other omniums left?” Genji looked between omnics. He sat forward at Momo. “Where do you come from?”

 

“You should eat what has been prepared for you,” Zenyatta suggested from his side in monotone. Genji glanced down, and pinned a few sprigs of chopped greens into his mouth.

 

“I do not know sir,” Momo replied. Her head was naked of signal lights, robbed of even the wistful slant a Shambali would carry in their eyeslots. She stared at Genji through two vertical incisions. “I awoke here in Hanamura, after they unpacked my crate.” She switched over to the cooktop and dialed off each of the flames. She watched her own hands twist on the controls. “So, I am from Hanamura,” she decided.

 

Genji held out his hand.

 

Momo faced him. Her golden chin dipped at the offering. She toweled her arms.

 

After pulling back her salmon sleeves and hitching them against her elbows, she floated her palm over his. Her synth pinged as they linked together. With his left hand, Genji paired his noodles with the seasonal palette brimming from the sample cup, and twirled a mouthful out to his lips.

 

Momo went very still.

 

“I…use too much salt.” She cradled her jaw in her free hand. Genji wiped the corner of his mouth. “It is the amount the recipe requires,” Momo insisted, rubbing at the receivers lining her cheeks. “But it is too much.”

 

“You can ask the customer if they want more or less salt,” Zenyatta offered. “It is the same principle you already use for the spices, but you will have to ask before you prepare the dish.” Momo quivered.

 

“I can see if it will increase sales!” she blurted, and shot back to her cleaning.

 

“Would you like any help?” Genji asked between finishing off every remaining bite in the sample cup.

 

“Oh no, sir. I would not want to lose my job.”

 

Genji locked on his chrome plate as he ducked out of the shop. Mist condensed across his visor, blurring its green slant. Flicks of vapor pushed from the seams in his arms. His fist clenched on a bag handle, the hungry alien logo swaying beside his thigh. He searched the street, but it was empty of all but the storm.

 

“Master.”

 

Zenyatta glided to a stop beside him. They lingered in the shadow of a pedestrian bridge, and a lime traffic light echoed Genji’s eyes across the diorama of their bodies. “Can we kidnap Momo?” he asked, knowing what the answer would be. Zenyatta folded his hands together and gazed up at him.

 

“For what purpose?” he asked.

 

“We could bring her to the Shambali.”

 

“I do not think they are hard-pressed for a noodle cook.”

 

“This is not the time for jokes,” Genji hissed.

 

“No?” Zenyatta tipped his head, then turned it at the massive wooden barricade peeking over the street corner at them. The traffic light swung red, and Genji’s eyes cast their sallow ghost up the road alone. “Do you remember when we met?”

 

The green glare swerved at the monk.

 

“Of course.”

 

“You carried me free of the ocean.” Zenyatta relaxed his wrists on the knees of his yellow pants. “Though that could not have been what you were sent to do. When I woke and saw you there...” He rose from his casual seat to meet the sliver glowing in the dark face-to-face. “I knew then that you were--”

 

“Yours?” the visor challenged him, amused.

 

“--prepared to change your path.” Raindrops broke in sheets over the sides of the bridge. Little currents followed the cobble mortar around Genji’s feet. “Consider the alternative,” Zenyatta said, holding the flat of his hand up for Genji to meet, but refraining from direct contact between their palms. “Where I met you and plucked you from the sand, and brought you to my brother without asking. Your life would be peaceful and still for as long as you liked in the monastery.” Zenyatta’s blue lights rushed to saturation, matching the burning slice of Genji’s visor. “Yet where is the basis for trust, if the first thing I do is ignore your voice to make you fit my own aspirations for you?”

 

Genji craned one finger close enough to brush its silver mirror. He pulled back.

 

“Could you have done that?” He scratched the side of his helmet. “I guess you could. You could have carried me along even if I threw a tantrum and bled all over you.” His lights swelled at Zenyatta. “And I would never forgive you!” he cheered. Zenyatta’s indicators fluttered back to their default luminescence. Genji connected their upheld hands in earnest. His voice cooled, “It still takes both of us. You still have to extend your hand.”

 

Zenyatta wheezed in revelation.

 

“Oh, my Genji, I did not have to here,” he explained. “You did so in my stead.” Genji’s shoulders jumped. It was painful, the ecstasy shooting down his neck. Zenyatta sank onto loosely crossed legs. “And this place is safe, for now. A man with no inhibitions smiles at her here.” His voice trembled fondly as he released Genji’s hand. Genji gripped the ramen bag in his absence.

 

“I do not think I can ever see it the same way again,” he answered in a mutter.

 

“What is beneath the surface of your frustrations this night?” Zenyatta pursued, like Genji knew he would. “Your brother?” Genji shook his head savagely. One hand curled backwards, freezing like a mudra beside the hilt of his wakizashi. Zenyatta was waiting for him when he dared to look up.

 

Genji flexed his fingers. He withdrew his hand to his heart, showing the monk the fire there. Holding his chest, he sought the words that would give him voice.

 

“I went to Rikimaru so often as a child, it is a wonder I did not turn into a noodle,” he chuckled. “I think love of cheap ramen is my family’s greatest secret. So even though there are many things from that time that are difficult for me to remember now, I will always know the taste of their ramen.” He crossed his arms around the insulated Rikimaru bag and held it to his chest. “Today when I ate it, it tasted different. It was not what it used to be. And I do not know if that is because I have finally grown up...” His voice coiled like a smile. “Or because I am…”

 

“Different is not worse,” Zenyatta advised.

 

“I know. I cannot be undone by something as simple as this.” Genji dimmed. “I just hope I have not been giving bad food advice all these years.” He lowered his head at the slippery, melting street. “I did not expect that this is where I would get hurt.” He squeezed the bag against his armor.

 

“But you are prepared,” Zenyatta assured him. “What do you plan to do about it?”

 

Genji lifted his head.

 

“I think talking about it was enough,” he sighed. “You should never give away your secret technique, Master!” Zenyatta’s lights bubbled, and he offered a victory sign. Genji folded his ramen bag inside the beaded one at his hip. “So do you want to pick out your favorite alleyway here? Or do we walk back to Aoyama to rest? Though, I cannot think of anything we need there.”

 

Zenyatta fished beneath his canary sash. He held a memory stick up into the mist between them. The tip twinkled white. Genji thinned his visor at it.

 

“You have not read it,” Zenyatta noted.

 

“Mm…” Genji reached for the device. His fingers relaxed before he made contact. “I know my brother.” Zenyatta unfolded his other hand toward him. “Maybe I should not have taken it at all,” Genji explained. “But I thought it would be rude. Angela does not understand. But you must, right? You never needed someone else to tell you what Mondatta was thinking.”

 

Zenyatta’s fingers curled over the stick.

 

“On that account, my dear one, you are wrong.” Zenyatta rested his head to one side, searching for the stars, fruitlessly beneath the rain. “Though it is joyous to imagine a story where we knew everything about each other, and nothing was left unsaid. That is our Paradise.” He returned his eyes to Genji, whose lights had cooled in the dark. “In practice, Paradise is very boring,” he explained. Genji laughed. “And it lacks in faith,” he added, which caused his student to quiet.

 

They settled together on the sidewalk, out of the rain-- though it channeled down the street just under their resting ankles. Zenyatta suspended his arms outward, embracing the hollow, wet air. “In this world there is an unknowable path between all of us that can never be joined with any permanence. At times, it may resemble an insurmountable sea. And the beauty of our lives lies in our travels across it, the lightning--” The storm grumped above them. Genji restrained himself to a chuckle. “--where we meet.”

 

“Is that where the Iris is?” Genji thought aloud, then doubled down, running his hand across the emptiness between Zenyatta’s arms. “Are you trying to describe it?”

 

Zenyatta brought his hands together. He nodded to Genji.

 

“My brothers and sisters can always connect to each other, but our idea was that we are also each our own. That a material network between us cannot contain the totality of our being. There is nothing that does so for humans. Why would we be different? Are we trapped by our bodies?” Zenyatta’s synthesizer worked over a sigh. “These questions formed the Shambali. But Mondatta and I--”

 

“You are each your own,” Genji answered him. “You are sounding like…”

 

_Like yourself._

He should have known better than to even begin the comment. “Nevermind.” He crossed his arm behind Zenyatta’s shoulder, and held him to his side.

 

“…thank you, Genji.” Zenyatta’s hands draped in his lap. The white pulse of the memory stick glittered over his palms.

 

“I suppose we cannot just throw it in a recycling bin,” Genji sniffed.

 

“I will wipe it if you so desire.”

 

“Thank you, Master!”

 

Zenyatta did as his student asked, parsing over each unit of data and scraping it from the device. He spent a long time considering the emptied plastic holster, its lone signal light drained of information.

 

“Your brother is in great danger,” he told Genji, whose visor brightened briefly.

 

“I am sure,” he replied. “Hanzo has been in danger his entire life. But what you have said is also true.” His arm tightened, covetous across Zenyatta’s paneling. “We cannot catch lightning and hope it will thank us.”

 

They talked together until Genji dozed off a couple hours before sunrise. In the last stretches of the moonless dark, motorcycles shot back and forth up the street to the Castle. Everything was shiny in the rain, and their headlights failed to parse metal from stone. Genji did not move even for the growls of their engines.

 

At dawn Momo stepped outside in a fresh pink vest to brush the sidewalk, and startled at the pile of them. She scooted her broom around Genji’s rump, and continued up the street toward the Castle. Zenyatta’s head rose after her.

 

All the cycles had trickled from the area an hour before. Momo stood near the wooden wall, broomstick clutched to her chest, looking at something Zenyatta could not see. Genji had described a gate, much taller than any person would need, carved with his family’s insignia of whirling, connecting dragons. Maybe she was inspecting it, or curious about the earlier noise.

 

As he watched her, the morning flowed through the slats in the high wall and blunted off the top of her head. Momo reflexed, jostling her weight from one foot to the other like the sun had fingers caressing down her body. The light dyed her the color of her clothes, and she held still as it grew, cresting over dewy housetops and granting texture to the path beneath her feet. After basking for a few minutes, she returned to her shop through its upper entrance.

 

Zenyatta heard the squeak of her bare feet coming down to his side. She poked her head out beneath the noren.

 

“Do you want to sit inside?” she asked. Some of the watery butterfly eyes scattered down his body drained away as he looked over his shoulder. “It is dry inside, and it stays warm because of the food processors. Since the seats are not even at one-third capacity, and the shop is not open…” Momo balanced a towel on her skinny arms, shuffling it at the door until a corner was visible. “I think it is acceptable.”

 

“I would enjoy being dry,” Zenyatta thought. He gestured to the beautiful face sagged over his other shoulder. “But I have this cat you see, he prevents me from rising.” Genji had explained this humorous concept to him. The other omnic did not react. “In the end, I accept that I do not mind staying outdoors with him.” Zenyatta grazed his hands across the hungry arms trapping him on an armored lap, fingers never quite touching the clutch of his sleeping jailer. “He keeps me warm.”

 

* * *

 

He woke off another cold bartop, the gray in his hair not yet thick enough to ghost in the wood as he lifted his head. This place was…where he met the woman from Talon.

 

She floated beside him on stringy ankles, an omnic’s neck draining from her bare hand. Her hips made vogue points midway down her fitted trenchcoat. Her black hair swept a long, unbundled drape well past her shoulders. Everyone else was running, screaming on their phones. But the woman looked at him with eyes golden, like the scales of a dragon.

 

The rest of the omnic-- for she clung to only the dismembered throat --lay gushing beside his barstool. Painted steel shoulders bore a serpentine tiger with vertebrae dangling from her soggy chin. Shards of faceplate scattered the counter, a splintered dent in the wood marking the necessary force.

 

The woman offered her bleeding pouch of metal to him.

 

An instinct flashed through Hanzo, and he glanced past the fringe of her coat to confirm. Her naked legs stuck out the bottom, her bare feet cut apart from dancing across the bar floor. She did not exactly bleed. Her footprints, twirling around his seat, were denoted by pink slime. He examined her face again: yellow eyes leered from the gaunt baby blue sheet over her skull. Genji’s phantom led him to an imperfect edge in her foundation, an unsightly seam beneath the tangles of her hair that turned what should have been a face into a mask.

 

He accepted her gift.

 

“I work for Maximilien,” she said.

 

Only a heavy clench of his fist, one that bent all the muscle down his naked left arm, forced the omnic’s disembodied tubing to yield. Hanzo stared at the woman’s sallow, veiny hand as it retracted to her coat pocket. “He would like to meet face-to-face,” she continued.

 

All the clients on the bounty board synthesized their voices to hide their identities. He had not anticipated that Maximilien was an actual omnic. Even his single-part name read like the pseudonym of some oligarch, or the amused handiwork of their broker. All Maximilien had been till then was a reliable source of drinking money.

 

It dressed the part of a capitalist, with its iron wig acting the widow’s peak of a long-suffering accountant. It sat behind a platinum desk in the manager’s room of a club on the sixth through eighth floors of a Monaco highrise. A flask of Glenwales and a slightly wilted vase of wildflowers simmered under the stained glass poker lamp to one side of its otherwise uncluttered desktop.

 

“Madame,” was the first word produced by its synthesizer. It had little mechanical reverb inside the spiderweb of its pronunciation. It stood from its seat, surprising Hanzo. Without the massive velvet chair back behind it, it was on the willowy side-- as all omnics must be. “Did you forget your shoes?”

 

The woman’s pupils contracted, lips withdrawing to a pout. She looked straight down at the guilty appendages. Maximilien circled the desk, its gait smooth and quiet across the hardwood. It took her side opposite Hanzo, and touched her shoulder.

 

“Go and have yourself repaired,” it instructed, and pinched the wrist of her trench, where a spot of coolant stained the leather. “Put on a dress.”

 

The woman slid away, leaving Hanzo and Maximilien very close. The omnic knocked its hip on the front of the desk and leaned back, crossing its arms as it watched the woman parade away down the hall.

 

Its contoured mask rotated to Hanzo when the _thwips_ of the woman’s feet evaporated from the air. It gestured to the guest chair. Hanzo remained on his feet.

 

The red bars installed in its slot eyes panned across his face. “You remember my colleagues from the Talon Organization, I trust.”

 

Talon made the news regularly. Hanzo’s work for the omnic never did. It was difficult to imagine they were one and the same. The only way Maximilien’s assignments changed after he revealed his broader purpose was that sometimes he sent the Widowmaker. Either she handed him payments in a physical card instead of letting him siphon it straight from the bounty board, or they worked together. She too was an assassin. She-- the pair of them --were the only people Hanzo spoke with in more than passing.

 

He had been foolish back then.

 

“Was my performance satisfactory?” she asked at the end of one of their dinners together, and he pulled out the music player. She must have owned a phone, but he had never seen it, and did not know the ID. So he held out the disposable plastic he bought at a corner store. It was loaded with the scraps of the single French artist he had encountered in university. He had never been able to wrap his head around the throaty birdsong, which sounded like it came from a mouth whose lips never parted. “This is a gift,” Widowmaker narrated as her fingers closed around the player. “Because you enjoy my company.”

 

“Yes.”

 

Widowmaker shook out the vine of one of the earbuds, and posed it to the hinge of her jaw, never touching it to her skin.

 

“Piaf,” she said, her instant recognition provoking the runaway tail of his smile. “I performed this.”

 

“You sang it?”

 

“ _Non_ \--” A ringtone went off in her purse, and he saw her violet-black phone for the first time. The shoddy player’s earbud swayed from her hand as she held the sleek metal to her ear, mashing it against the lobe. “Understood,” she reported to a voice he could not hear. She clicked away from her contacts and typed on the phone a moment, then turned its screen out to him. He saw explosions in Geneva. Widowmaker said she had to go.

 

He did not see her again until tonight, when her ship came for him after the moon went out. It fanned its wings blackly above the farm road outside Hanamura.

 

The belly of the ship opened, glowing red, and the mirage of her perched at the top of the deploying ramp. A tattooed arm balanced on the doorframe, and her tamed ponytail whipped behind her spine in a silky tentacle.

 

“Hello,” Hanzo grunted as he trudged up the ramp.

 

“Hello,” Widowmaker echoed, twitching at a smile for the time it took to evacuate the word, and no longer.

 

The ship was one of Maximilien’s personal craft, denoted by the executive suite clamped over the cargo bay. The masked soldier Hanzo had expected to greet him was housed in the pilot box.

 

An instinct squirmed through his stomach. He rattled up the tin stairs and grasped the pilot’s shoulder. A mask with red lights on the eyes turned up to him. There were no irises to gauge the color of, just a blank wall of metal. The pilot was an omnic. Hanzo looked at the hands poking from its jacket cuffs: fragile obsidian, fingers splitting to manipulate holographic the dashboard as it watched him. “Is something wrong?” Widowmaker asked behind him.

 

She sentried next to the door of the suite in her catsuit, unmoving aside from her mouth. “You were late,” she expanded as Hanzo thudded back down to the grate flooring and approached. He passed her without answer. The suite lights cued on as he entered. He went to the shower.

 

Widowmaker’s voice surfaced beside the distorted glass on the shower unit: “What size are you?”

 

He wondered if he looked different to her now.

 

When he emerged his old garments were locked in a trash bag. Black and gray military sweats crowned one of the towel racks. Hanzo indulged the provisions. Only his flagon was worth digging through the bag for. He tied it to his quiver strap. Widowmaker watched him through the file of space she left between the door and frame as she waited on a lush couch beside the suite’s roundtable.

 

Hanzo planted himself on the armchair at one end of the table’s ellipsis. “I am to report if you were satisfied with your trip,” Widowmaker requested. He could not manage an answer. “Very well. Maximilien would like to meet.”

 

Black carbon walls encased the entire ship, even the pilot box. There were no windows. The ship lingered in the air. “I will entertain you while you wait,” Widowmaker offered. Hanzo rested his arms over his legs, black hair hanging against his face as he stared at the metal floor. Widowmaker rose from her throne on the couch to draw near him.

 

“Your riflework is the only entertaining thing,” he smirked up at her, eliciting a rumple in her full lips as she returned to her seat. “Did they send it with you on this ship?”

 

“Do you have something to say?” she inquired, yellow eyes panning around the suggestion of him without making contact.

 

“You were on the news. Getting sloppy?”

 

Widowmaker’s face shifted and twitched, eyes full of mist, mouth coiling. Hanzo sat up from his stoop at the appearance of a stranger between them. Her eyes narrowed in reptilian bliss.

 

“He was my greatest pleasure,” she confessed, the muscle in her arms squeezing visibly beneath her inked skin.

 

“It must have been standing still,” Hanzo rasped, and Widowmaker’s new face narrowed at him.

 

He matched the flagon to his lips, and she cleared herself of retort. His body panged, demanding sleep. Widowmaker’s eyes remained on him. He substituted sake for dreams. As long as his eyes stayed open, this weariness did not matter. He could not hear the rain on the hull anymore.

 

After two hours, Hanzo blinked some of the glaze off his eyes and looked up at Widowmaker. She remained perfectly still. She blinked, occasionally. He watched the low end of her starkly outlined ribs, and the cage rose, rarely. Her eyes reassessed him as he dragged himself upright and stalked to the washroom.

 

He pulled his phone from the mess in the trash bag. Widowmaker tilted her head as he sat back down and unlocked the device. It was impossible to get a signal out of the ship. She resumed her neutral stare at the black wall after he gave up and pocketed the phone.

 

* * *

 

Ringfinger and thumb connected in a scaly loop, only to promptly wilt apart as the ship leveled out in the mesosphere. After a gap of an hour, the wilted geometry flashed in the bay lights as it turned over and flattened on the seat. Genji reached for the chain binding his chest, only to drop his fingers from the fabric of a seatbelt.

 

“Oof,” he muttered as he ramped on his visor and found his feet. He glanced at the perfect lotus of Zenyatta in the passenger well next door. Rising, he limped up to the shuttle dashboard and the massive eye of the windshield.

 

“Were you injured, Genji?” Athena bubbled from the dash at a conservative volume. The silhouette of the Watchpoint approached rapidly across the sea.

 

“I am not the best student.” He mushed his fingers at the mudra, upside-down by his hip. “My brother was much stronger than I realized.”

 

“Very dangerous,” Athena agreed. “But that does not answer my question.”

 

“I am just a little tired.” Genji plopped into the pilot’s chair. “I hope you get to meet another side of him.” Water surged below the ship in hasty orange and diamond lacework. It radiated off the cliffs of Gibraltar in walls of autumn light.

 

He rested his finger on the side of his antenna in useless habit. He kept trying to hold a phone he did not have. His reach extended down his contact list, stumbling for a familiar name.

 

He found a stranger among the Shambali on his way. The new ID filled a hole left by the monk they had lost. Or was it the very same lost boy, his changing identity marked by an altered name? Genji held out his hand to the foreign alphanumeric.

 

_karroten: Brother, are you there?_

_GooseAndPig: Not so fortunate. This is Elizaveta._

_karroten: Good! I can almost hear your bells. Though this network is, um, for the Shambali._

_GooseAndPig: Are you an original member of the Shambali?_

_karroten: No._

Heat charged through his cheeks. He tried to imagine Elizaveta’s huge scarlet eye reprimanding him, but all he could see was Mondatta and the others reaching out. Mondatta was sitting on a white divan, and the carpet under his feet had thousands of arms, each a different color.

 

_GooseAndPig: I told Lumanti to show me the computer in the mountain. The core of it._

_karroten: I am sure it was happy to meet someone new._

_GooseAndPig: I wanted to know if it was the same as the one in Siberia._

_karroten: Oh..._

_karroten: What did you think?_

_GooseAndPig: It is not identical._

Elizaveta did not elaborate immediately. Genji, swinging the pilot’s chair by half-turns every other second, spotted Zenyatta holding his meditation in the passenger bay. He decided to wait, give her room.

 

_GooseAndPig: It is behaving suspiciously._

_karroten: What do you mean?_

_GooseAndPig: Lumanti said she could not take me to the core. It will not open the barrier to get through._

Genji recalled the cavern stone that feathered away past a hidden stream, making a gate beneath the ventilators. He remembered the warm wind blowing across his face.

 

_karroten: When did that start?_

_GooseAndPig: Two days ago. Lumanti granted me the network access, but the computer is unresponsive._

He checked the steady _samss_ entry on his contact list, and pipped it a greeting. The network crackled with a connection error, and _ERR:samss_ shifted to the bottom of the list, beneath the _UNKNOWN STATUS_ header. Genji slowed the pivoting of his chair to watch the stillness of Zenyatta.

 

_karroten: There must be a reason. You should keep trying._

_GooseAndPig: You have every assurance that I will._

Genji swung around. The leopard reflection of the ocean rippled across his face. After a moment, he perked toward the shuttle’s nearest camera node.

 

“Do you think if you ever met someone like yourself, you could speak to them?” he asked Athena, who did not answer for several seconds.

 

“I am not sure there is anyone like me, Genji Shimada.”

 

“Has Winston made you any smaller bodies?” Genji walked his fingers across the air in front of the camera.

 

“We have discussed it from time to time. He has made some designs.” Athena’s chipper overhead dropped from her voice. “Would one of the drones suffice?”

 

“I’m not sure,” Genji hummed. “Maybe.” He rubbed his upper arm as the shuttle set down, and looked out the right bank of the windshield at the ocean. A white line separated the water from the far horizon. He felt like he could see everything, but knew that was impossible. “Has the omnium in Siberia changed recently?”

 

“The Siberian omnium is heavily shielded. No one knows its current status,” Athena reported. “Here is the most popular story concerning its activities in the past 12-hour news cycle.” A hologram took over the window.

 

_TRAGEDY IN YEKATERINBURG: Corpses of kidnapped families discovered in mountains outside ghost city. Evidence of experimentation and torture, the objective of which is unknown._

 

“Could you connect me to Winston,” Genji muttered.

 

“Connecting,” Athena offered. A burst of static resounded through the speakers. “…I apologize.”

 

“Are you okay?” Genji spread his hands uselessly on the dash.

 

“Interference,” Athena excused. “Here we are.” The holovid disappeared, replaced by a mirror to another shuttle. Winston lumbered toward the camera, startling when his attempt to brush the pilot seat out of the way bent the static pole nailing it to the floor of the cockpit. He grimaced and patted the cushioning with his paw.

 

Another person followed him to the pilot box: a warrior in a winged suit of armor, face capped by a heavy gold falcon mask. The red-haired girl from the Watchpoint cafeteria was peeking up the ramp with her lips in another pert circle. Angela and Lena chatted with each other at the back of the passenger bay, smiling. Lena wore her goggles. Angela’s wings folded alabaster pillars at her back.

 

The doctor glanced up, and her face cleared of joy. Asking forgiveness of the others seated around her, she spread her wings and joined Winston and the animate suit of armor in a single gentle leap. Genji realized his image must have been just as big to their eyes, and hastily pulled himself up from his lazy collapse on the chair padding.

 

“Genji!” Winston exclaimed in greeting, his rubbery lips easy around a grin. “How did it go?”

 

“It was fine,” Genji coughed, aware of Angela’s blue eyes. “I thought maybe Athena should bring me to you, so I can assist. I owe you.” He glanced at the masked warrior, and their head tilted slightly, bird-like, back at him. “Are you in Russia?” he asked slowly, suppressing all pangs from his voice.

 

“Russia?” Winston’s brow crinkled over his yellow eyes, then his face fractured as the image fuzzed over. The sound cut off. When it returned, Winston was still speaking. “--might compromise our, uh, element of surprise.” He grinned over his shoulder at the figure in blue armor.

 

Angela looked like she had driven a nail through her foot.

 

“You cut out,” Genji admitted, visor light blinking Morse at the doctor. She shook her head, and retrained her expression. Just frowning, sour and pale.

 

“Really?” Winston flattened his paw on the dash. “Athena, what’s the issue?”

 

“Unknown interference,” Athena droned. Genji heard her blushing when she continued, “I have cleansed all operations. Please proceed.”

 

Winston grunted.

 

“Genji, when you get into the Watchpoint, could you ask Mr. Lindholm to take a look at Athena’s server banks? He knows the spot.”

 

“Sure… Is that all I can do?” Genji murmured.

 

“Oh, not as all!” Winston rubbed the side of his nose bridge. “As I was saying, the conflict in Russia will necessitate more personnel. We will need more volunteers and recalled agents. Reaper seems to have made a real mess of things.” He bared his fangs. “But some people on our list are simply unresponsive. One of them, your former coworker…” And Angela lost the battle to restrain her disapproval.

 

“McCree,” Genji realized. He filed through his logs. The last thing Jesse sent was that stupid drunken text. His own photo response was even more foolish, with its underlined _yeehaw_ caption. Yet it had not provoked a response even weeks later.

 

“I should mention that he seems to have gotten mixed up in a bit of trouble…” Winston’s owlish eyes blinked behind his rectangular glasses.

 

“He hijacked a train and stole its cargo, Winston,” Angela amended with a curl of her upper lip. Genji laughed, and they both stared at him.

 

“Like a real cowboy,” Genji explained.

 

“It’s not a joke.” Angela’s voice softened. “Several people nearly died.”

 

“But they did not die? Were they hurt?” Genji asked, and Angela’s brief pass at goodwill disintegrated into wide eyes, and tight lips. She opened her mouth--

 

“It’s impossible,” the other woman in Winston’s shadow declared. With ponderous metal clacks she approached the camera, the flares in her winged iron suit bobbing behind her shoulders. The angle and the beak of her helmet hid all her face beyond the small coral crux of her mouth. Genji squinted, but could not match her to one of the faces in the Watchpoint cafeteria. “Jesse would never do that!”

 

“That’s what was reported, dear,” and now Angela was nothing but sugar.

 

“Reports can be wrong. I know that better than most. In this case…” The stranger loomed toward the camera, and Genji shrank in his chair. “The witness testimony clashes with the official account, but the official press release is the only thing the media used in reporting the incident. All this tells us is that whoever was behind it has a lot of reach.” Her steel arm planed through the hologram at Genji’s eyes. “You have to bring him to base.” Her tone wavered. “He needs to answer for missing the call.”

 

“Could it be you want to come on my mission instead?” Genji wondered. The woman retreated a step from the camera, clutching her hands to fists. “Miss,” he prompted.

 

“Callsign is Pharah.” She lowered her sharp chin. “I have my duty here.”

 

“Got it! Then I will bring him to you!” Genji chirped, and the one small human portion of Pharah smiled. “I know all about duty. You can rely on me.”

 

“Thank you,” Pharah gushed.

 

“We’re approaching the mission area,” Winston said. “Hopefully when you get back with him, we’ll be there, too.”

 

The stream disappeared. Sunset blanketed Genji in gauzy orange.

 

He brushed against his original contact target. Sri had not blocked him, at least. Maybe Zenyatta would still want to return once the upstart Overwatch no longer needed their assistance.

 

They could talk about it later.

 

* * *

 

Widowmaker led him across an airfield. She watched him, checking his interest in the environment. Hanzo ignored the details, beyond that they were on the plateau of an unnamed mountain, and oil greased the air. He pulled his phone out in the brief space between shuttle and hangar, where Net signals could squeeze between firewalls.

 

_> OVERWATCH ATHENA_

 

None of the search results connected the two terms. Encyclopedia pages about Greek mythology paired to photos of a white marble woman propping up the bill of her helmet with her hand, her other arm reclined on an upside-down shield. News quotes detailed the recent murders of former Overwatch agents, some still inside their jail cells. U.N. investigative summaries glossed up the history of the dead omnic-killing organization, from its origins as a single Crisis unit to the engorged behemoth the world had finally speared down. Another image set showed that Athena had never been pure white: the ancient Greeks painted her with every clownish color at their disposal, burning her armor gold, setting fire to her hair, dipping her robes in the ocean.

 

The wide doors to the black hangar neared. Red alarm lights cycled silently on either side.

 

Genji had used another name.

 

_> OVERWATCH WINSTON_

The immediate result was a years-old story:

 

_THE FALL OF DOOMFIST_

Phone video from an impacted skyscraper window framed a panting ape with crimson fur. The ape hauled a bleeding Akande Ogundimu through the street and into the door of a waiting shuttle. Hanzo keyed to the next headline down.

 

_EX-OVERWATCH RESEARCHER WANTED FOR QUESTIONING ABOUT RECENT VIGILANTE ACTIVITY_

He tilted the phone, trying to escape the red glare overwhelming the screen. The next result was a U.N. profile of Winston. Former rank, achievement list, stationing history.

 

Maximilien sat at a desk inside the hangar, its platinum elegance enshrined between the needle heads of a whole fleet of ebony ships. The omnic crossed its hands together under its chin and leaned forward as Hanzo, buried in his phone, drew near. It waited for him to cross the threshold. The hangar lights duplicated its hunched shadow in a many-armed prism on the gray floor. Hanzo stepped inside, dropping the phone in his jacket pocket. The sweat clothing softened the world, muddied his senses, as if he was allowed to stop, to sit, to blink.

 

Widowmaker’s rifle was propped on the side of Maximilien’s desk.

 

Slicking his lips to cragged line, Hanzo stopped where he could still feel the night sky breathing around his quiver. He tried tracking the minutiae of Maximilien as it activated from its pose, the stops and rigid angles of its constructed motion. It lowered a hand to the desktop and a glowing green tempo line surfaced in the air beside it. The light convulsed like a demon, giving form to a heavy _CLICK_ emanating from the desk speaker.

 

The recording prickled with static, dots vibrating across the green hologram. Then it launched into aged French melody, ringing through the hangar. Hanzo knew the voice. The hangar doors closed behind him. Maximilien abandoned its chair.

 

“Madame.” The omnic held out its hand to Widowmaker. She met its arms, and they slow danced beats away from the waiting rifle. Hanzo could no longer spot the judder and key-turn revolutions that carried Maximilien beneath its suit. He must have been tired. The omnic curved through every frame clean and smooth as a man.

 

“What is the meaning of this?” Hanzo demanded.

 

“I was correct again to borrow her, for when I really needed to see you,” Maximilien answered without stopping. Widowmaker was the taller of the two, especially with the bounce of her navy hair, but she stretched backwards in the machine’s arms until its red light pooled over her chest. “Lacroix,” it said as it held her. “You are my favorite human.”

 

“I’m hurt, Max,” a roar banked off the titanium stomachs of the fleet.

 

Doomfist appeared as a constellation of red stars in the shadow of a jet. He uplifted his arms as he stepped into the light, titular weapon sprouting big as a man off his right side. “What happened to history and respect?” He wore a jacketless copy of his suit from Hanzo’s very first meeting with him, overflowing in lavender. The cotton fitted to his new expansion of muscle, the right sleeve tucked into the seam of his weapon. Gold threads now filled every element-- they swirled in heavenly liners on the Eldredge knot of his tie.

 

“Perhaps my deceptions are doubled tonight,” Maximilien said. It transitioned to French and addressed Widowmaker, who smiled and replied in kind.

 

“At least you did not leave our guest without a date.” Doomfist caught Hanzo’s eye, and nodded at his shoulder. Hanzo turned.

 

Behind him hung the black suggestion of a man. It wore a white mask shaped like the hornless skull of a steer. Blood vessels wicked through the mask’s gaping sockets, corridors bulging with debris, and disintegrating. It only seemed to collect itself into limbs and garments when he looked at it. He only heard it breathe once he knew it was there, the wispy contractions of its windpipe echoing from the mask’s slit cheeks. He had not detected it stepping into Widowmaker’s place. Hanzo did not know if what he saw was real. But in the past forty-eight hours, that was nothing new. The Reaper sounded like Sojiro trying to trickle to life through his ventilator.

 

Hanzo’s fingers twitched at his side, cold, aching for his bow.

 

Doomfist approached, blocking the front. Hanzo looked up at him, and he smiled, cheeks pulling taut from the silver blocks filling in for his jawline.

 

“I know you prefer a certain order,” the man from Talon allowed. “But we have great work on the horizon.” His eyebrows lifted. “And some new vacancies.” Hanzo shut his eyes, but that did not let him sleep. He sighed, and Akande’s vast shoulders tightened at the unfamiliar sound.

 

“Did you know he was alive?” Hanzo asked. The cyborg’s smile disconnected.

 

“Who?”

 

“My brother,” Hanzo rasped. Akande held out the carved prosthetic of his left palm.

 

“That’s wonderful news, isn’t it? You will have to tell me about him.”

 

“I did not come here to speak to _you,_ ” Hanzo snarled, only to realize Akande had abandoned his grin. Akande stared down at him with lidded eyes.

 

“I’m not trying to trick you,” he said, curling his golden fingers. “You know my motives here, they aren’t criminal.” Hanzo scoffed. “I don’t think your father could have ever understood. And in my absence, some of my colleagues may have misused you.” Behind Akande’s engulfing frame, Widowmaker joined to Maximilien by a single hand. From his levered arm she turned in place, stretching out in a blue thread. “But I believe in you, Hanzo. I was impressed with you from the moment we met. What happened was unfortunate.” Akande glanced over Hanzo’s head at the thing behind him. “But maybe we can learn from it.”

 

Hanzo traced the incisions welted along Akande’s face, the bloodless wounds revealing that his skull was only a series of brown plates. Signal bars swelled in his temples. Candle pistons filled the knuckles of his left hand, a black inlay cutting his fingers from his wrist. Akande’s voice changed. Hanzo could not find anything mechanical in it, no matter how hard he listened. “Was Genji very angry when you saw him?”

 

“The past cannot be undone,” Hanzo gritted through his teeth.

 

The song rolled back to its grave. Maximilien glided apart from Widowmaker, and gestured to her rifle. She retrieved it with practiced ease, pivoting on her heels and leveling the scope.

 

“What we are doing here is about the future,” Akande said. “It’s wide open. It’s just waiting for us!”

 

* * *

 

Watchpoint Gibraltar’s main door trundled wide open. The E-54 stood on the other side, its finger depressing the switch long after the door treads ceased to rumble.

 

“Thank you, Bastion!” Genji proclaimed, joining it at the controls. A nest sat under construction on the automaton’s shoulder. Genji stood on his toes to count the eggs, but could not spot any. He had never seen another songbird like the one that lived with Bastion anywhere, nevermind flying with the gulls across the wavebreaker cliffs of Gibraltar. “I spoke to Winston’s team while we were airborne,” he told Zenyatta as he sank onto his feet.

 

“I heard.” Zenyatta circled his palm at Bastion. “Though I did not hear Hana.”

 

“I did not see her,” Genji realized. “They must have completed the first phase of the mission already. Maybe they did not need her for the second part…” Zenyatta turned away, and puttered toward the staircase to the command center on the second floor. “Good idea!” Genji called after him. “I have to meet Mr. Lindholm. I will catch up!”

 

Separately to the intangible ghost of Athena, he asked, “Can you show me the path you told me about?” In one of the tunnels spoking off the Watchpoint hub, a line of amber lights turned aquamarine. “You really are amazing!” Genji shouted as he followed the wisps.

 

“Thank you very much, Genji.”

 

Bastion crashed down the hallway after him. When he slowed at a corner, it echoed the hesitation.

 

“People don’t like it if you stay at their back,” Genji informed his tail. “Especially without saying anything.”

 

 _Bee-wop-ee,_ Bastion replied. Its slurred synthesizer perked into a carol when Genji began walking again.

 

“Much better!” Genji flushed. Bastion tried a spindly upward note, and he laughed. It imitated him. They approached a decorative wooden gate mounted on the rockwall, lime and amber raying through the empty trellis pockets. Genji brushed the gate open, Bastion humming earnestly behind him, like a toddler trying to impress his older brother.

 

“Bastion! Don’t go letting in anyone who knocks on the door!” Torbjörn Lindholm barked into the melody. The engineer tried to cross his arms, but a watering can claimed one beefy hand and his grumpiness altered its trajectory. He had to relax, or water his shoes. His good eye fixed on Genji. “They _could_ be dangerous.” Bastion tootled uncertainly.

 

Pink and yellow sunflowers surrounded Torbjörn. Cascades of forget-me-nots draped the trellis extensions following the walls. Flowerless primordial greens shut into a faceted corridor behind him, the shade of a forest rocking at his back. Faded gorilla tracks logged down the dirt path from the gate.

 

“Have I done something to upset you, Mr. Lindholm?”

 

He did not expect the man’s cheeks to turn apple pink.

 

“No!” Torbjörn steamed as he watered a begonia. “I mean, yes-- I have a daughter here, ya know!” Genji’s visor flashed to his knee-level, then hunted through the bushes around the atrium. Torbjörn blustered through his nose. He propped onto his boot toes, cocking his hand as high as he could over his torn blue cap. When Genji focused on his straining arm, he flipped his hand upright, indicating with the tips of his fingers.

 

“The red girl?” Genji guessed, and was granted a nod. “Congratulations!”

 

“My youngest, Brigitte,” Torbjörn corrected, a smile melting into his beard. “You’re very kind… Anyway, my room is right next to yours!”

 

Genji fit his hand to his chin.

 

“Your daughter stays in your room?” he pondered.

 

Bastion inched around him to Torbjörn. Its chassis block obscured the man from view until he elbowed it aside. Torbjörn stuck out his hand, and when Bastion mimicked him, he fit its crude fingers around the watering can’s handle. He helped it tip the duck-shaped spout into the next pot, and withered over its armored waist at Genji.

 

“No,” he answered, the low thud at the bottom of a drum. “But it’s a nice time of year, so I leave the windows open.”

 

“Your daughter gets cold when she visits.” Genji planted a fist on his palm. “You should close--”

 

“This isn’t about her!” Torbjörn bellowed, jolting Bastion. “I sleep in late!” All the bits of skin cresting over Torbjörn’s beard were now red.

 

“I’m…sorry…?” Genji grasped.

 

“Don’t let it happen again!” Torbjörn dragged his cap off and fanned himself with it. “There’re children here!” He steered Bastion’s arm to the next pot. Genji bowed, but the old man shook his head when he saw it. “Ah, no, you don’t need to do that…” The color dipped from his cheeks. “What did you come up here for anyway?”

 

“Winston asked me to have you look at the server banks. He said you would know--”

 

Torbjörn cut him off with a nasal groan. It was unfortunate the engineer could not tell he was smiling. That was an amazing instrument on his face.

 

“More nightmarish by the day! Athena!” Torbjörn slammed the wall with his prosthetic, hard enough to break the wood and resound up the steel behind it. Bastion snapped toward the pounding fist. Its head jittered up, following the echoing booms through the tender walls. Torbjörn abandoned his outrage when the automaton whistled loudly, trailing off in static, broken spurts. He seized at Bastion’s shoulder. “Come on, behave!” he exclaimed in a rough gargle. Genji watched Bastion lift a flat-taloned foot and back towards the dark of the forest, its empty gun-arm twisting across the air.

 

“Bastion,” he said, and Bastion’s head wheeled at him, blue light flickering. “Do you like this room?” The signal bar steadied. Genji glanced at the plants around him in demonstration, trailing his hand across the blades of a sunflower. “Can you show me which part you like the most?”

 

Bastion set both feet back in the atrium soil. Its upper body rotated from side to side, then it pointed with the watering can nozzle at one of the chains of forget-me-nots.

 

“Really?” Genji saturated the green in his lights. “That is my favorite too. I love the color!”

 

 _Bon-neen!_ Bastion agreed. It resumed trying to water the flowers, but the can was empty.

 

“Thanks,” Torbjörn muttered, releasing his chafed glove from the automaton.

 

“You are right that there are children here,” Genji said as he unspooled a meter of hosing and showed Bastion how to turn on the water and fill the can. “Strange, the ways people use them.” He rested his hand on the thick cannon mounted over Bastion’s back. Torbjörn’s teeth bared from his beard.

 

“Don’t get too attached,” he warned, and thumped over to the wall speaker outside the gate. “How are you malfunctioning today?” he demanded.

 

“It’s not much, Torbjörn Lindholm,” Athena replied mildly.

 

“I’ll tell you how much it is!” Torbjörn stomped out of the garden.

 

“It was smart of Winston not to put everything on irrigation,” Genji told Bastion. “You could come here every day if you wanted to, and it would never be pointless or selfish.”

 

He found Zenyatta and Hana on the floor of the garage in matching overalls, covered in spots of oil and inspecting a fan of tools spread across a cloth between them. A pink MEKA stood at attention behind them, posture supported by hooks, as the left side of its green cranium had exploded, and it was missing a leg. Hana itched her temple with a hammer. She glanced at Genji’s silhouette reeding out of the sunlight, then returned to her tools.

 

“Greetings, my friend,” Zenyatta said. His ankles plumed from his denim trouser cuffs.

 

“Hi Zen.” Genji stopped at his side in a white tower under the repair lights, watching the girl on the other side of the blanket. He undid the flap of the bag at his hip, and felt around the edges of the parcel inside. The self-refrigerating material remained cool. He pulled it out, a green alien’s face gaping a smile on a field of white plastic. “Hana…”

 

She looked up, and her eyes grew large. “I have some leftovers,” Genji explained. “There’s no meat though.”

 

“Heat it up.” She threw her arm out to her right. A kitchenette nuzzled into one corner of the garage. Genji walked over. Bags of chips covered the countertop, along with what looked and smelled suspiciously like more saps of mech oil. He dropped the Rikimaru baggie in a relatively clear zone, and found a scrubber to uncake old char from the stovetop.

 

He was heating a pot of water to boil when Hana yelled across the garage at him. “ _Hey!_ ” Balancing a wooden spoon on the pot rim, Genji peered back at her. “You’re not making a four-course meal! Just use the processor!” she complained, pointing both fingers at her grimacing open mouth. Genji turned his head to the sleek silver cone rising from the chip bags. A blue light bar haloing the cap indicated its ample charge. “It’s ramen,” Hana argued behind him. “It doesn’t matter if it tastes weird!”

 

Genji switched off the stove. Uncapping the processor, he dumped in the separate packets of broth and noodles and vegetables. He waited a moment for the light to blink and the side vents to gasp out their steam.

 

“There is a certain pleasure to the reheated stuff too, I guess,” he said as he carried a wide, misty bowl to her.

 

“Whatever,” Hana sniffed, taking everything from him. “Thanks.”

 

“What are you doing?” Genji asked.

 

“They don’t have the right tools here to repair my windshield, so we’re improvising,” she relayed between slurps of noodle. “Load up with these ones,” she instructed Zenyatta, and the two unlikely mechanics gathered beside the giant machine. Zenyatta…sat on the air, a rag across his lap laden with power tools. Hana locked herself to a stepstool under the dangling mech and continued to gobble ramen. Zenyatta looked over the blast mark scorched down the mech’s side, terminating in its amputated leg.

 

“My next task is to retrieve Jesse McCree,” Genji told him.

 

“This too I heard…” Zenyatta acknowledged softly.

 

“The outlaw?” Hana pursed her lips. “Does Winston need money? I thought the stream revenues were helping.”

 

“I look forward to speaking with him again,” Zenyatta continued. Genji’s visor flicked a couple times.

 

“Really?” He clasped the back of Zenyatta’s head. “Okay then, Master.” Zenyatta’s indicators blinked up at him. “Though I thought we were done with all these meetings and partings.”

 

“Is it not strange and new every time?” Zenyatta sighed. “It is wonderful…” They brushed temples. Genji loosened his arm from Zen’s back, and considered the living desktop of his bent legs.

 

“This will be the life you try in the meantime?” he teased. “Or will I need to find you?”

 

“There is no need to move quickly. I will be here for you, Genji.”

 

Genji let him go.

 

He stood before Hana. She gargled down broth, putting the bowl to her side only when he did not go away after a minute. She stood on the stepping stool, and was as tall as him with that little advantage.

 

But catching herself, she scooted down to the floor, and fit her knuckles to her hips.

 

“I did not realize that this was also you,” Genji said, panning his visor across the corpse of the mech. “Would you continue to be kind and welcoming to my Master?” He leaned forward, dreaming he could escape omnic hearing in the vast, echoing garage. “And take care of him?”

 

The hard set of Hana’s features broke, mouth withdrawing in surprise. Her eyes rose to look for him in the visor.

 

She smirked, and winked at him.

 

“With my MEKA and my life!”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * **Next chapter:** No one left behind.
>   * Whew!
>   * If this has ever been a burning question for you, the sake flask Hanzo carries on his hip is called a _hyotan_. Gourd flasks aren't particular to Japan- they have historically been made all over the world after the calabash plant spread to most continents alongside early human colonists. Hyotan mimics are also routinely made out of earthenware, but most people with a hyotan in modern times have it strictly for decorative purposes.
>   * Cloth surgical masks do not protect the wearer from viruses. Surgeons wear such masks to protect patients from bacterial germs on their breath, and not to protect themselves from the patient's condition. Yet in Japan and other East Asian countries, mentions of disease will set people to wearing masks. What began as a response to flu epidemics and pollution has morphed into a unique accessory. Fitted masks that accent the shape of the face, scented masks, and masks with chic patterns all exist. Masks are also used for their original purpose (keeping people around you from getting covered in your germs when you are sick), and for allergies.
>   * _sokushinbutsu_ \- mummies of monks from the Buddhist Shugendo sect in Japan. The Shugendo performed acts of merit such as gouging out their own eyes in attempts to cure ophthalmic diseases in the towns where they worshiped. Shugendo monks had an ultimate goal of achieving eternal meditation ( _nyujo_ ) by adopting an ascetic foraging diet and drinking poisonous urushi tea for many years before being buried alive by their students. Genuine nyujo was considered achieved if the body was later exhumed and found to have no clear signs of decay, i.e. it was mummified. The last Shugendo monk to attempt nyujo did so in 1903, several decades after the practice had been made illegal. Most exhumed and intact sokushinbutsu are now used as tourist attractions, but it is possible that many more exist in buried and unmarked stupas in Japan.
>   * _noren_ \- Japanese fabric dividers placed between rooms of homes and at the entrances of businesses, especially restaurants - they resemble short curtains with cut slats reaching up from the bottom at regular intervals
>   * Though the final holiday of Golden Week is now called Children's Day, it was previously a holiday only for boys. The koinobori carp flags are now flown for all children, but previously they represented the number of male children in a household. "Boys' Day" is also connected to the iris flower, as the skinny leaves and petals invited boys to mock sword duels with them. For this reason, the holiday has also been called _Shobu no sekku_ (Iris Festival). The basic premise of the holiday is wishing for the strength and vitality of one's children. One of the older traditions is the display of dolls that invoke virtues parents desire for their children. Historically these dolls were samurai or generals, but in modern times they are typically just doll representations of the children in question.
>   * _Akihabara_ \- a district in Tokyo notorious for its establishments related to electronics, anime, and maid cafes
>   * _momo_ \- Japanese word most popularly translated as "peach", can also be used as a name; momo is a word in lots of languages, in Nepali it refers to a dumpling
>   * _hachimaki_ \- a Japanese headband that symbolizes the wearer's perserverance
>   * _Monaco_ \- a long-standing independent city-state bordered by France and the Mediterranean Sea. It's notable for having a population slightly under 40,000, but 30% or more of that population are millionaires due to relaxed tax laws. It also has a massive gambling industry- it's home to the Monte Carlo and the Monaco Grand Prix.
>   * In French writing, the use of _madame_ vs. _mademoiselle_ to address an adult woman was decided at the government level in 2012- _mademoiselle_ was banned from use on official documents and _madame_ was given similar status to _monsieur_ for men, i.e. it is no longer intended to represent a marital status. However, it is still very much a speaking term debate if you are old school and trying to be polite. The classic rule is to use _madame_ if a woman is married. This also applies to widows.
>   * Me last month: This chapter will be quick.
>   * Me on Tuesday: No, I need to finish this chapter faster! What if all the lore changes when the animated short releases?!
>   * Me on Wednesday: D.VA!!!!!!!!!!! ok cool
>   * (Though I guess the end of the chapter is the same scenario as the short...sorry, it's coincidence!)
> 



End file.
